“There's one thing—I'm a plain-spoken man myself—what is there for us two—us seafaring men?”
“There is five hundred pounds for each of you,” replied the white-haired gentleman for himself, in slow and careful English.
Captain Cable nodded his grizzled head over the chart.
“I like to deal with a gentleman,” he said, gruffly.
“And so do I,” replied the white-haired foreigner, with a bow.
Captain Cable grunted audibly.
III
A SPECIALTY
A muddy sea and a dirty gray sky, a cold rain and a moaning wind. Short-capped waves breaking to leeward in a little hiss of spray. The water itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the breeze—Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.