" Measured by the Elsinore's chickens, it
is a misnomer.
Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming,
topaz eyes, spunkless. Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest
of the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech,
nevertheless they are good sailors and are always first to spring
into any enterprise of work or peril. They have gone into Mr.
Mellaire's watch, and they are quite apart from the rest of the
sailors. And when there is a delay, or wait, with nothing to do for
long minutes, they shoulder together, and stand and sway to the heave
of deck, and dream far dreams in those pale, topaz eyes, of a
country, I am sure, where mothers, with pale, topaz eyes and sandy
hair, birth sons and daughters that breed true in terms of topaz eyes
and sandy hair.
But the rest of the crew! Take the Maltese Cockney. He is too
keenly intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure.
He is a shadow of his former self. His cheeks have fallen in. Dark
circles of suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and
English intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as
if aflame with fever.
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