another,—if I do not sadly confuse you by putting it that way,—and I had forgotten all that had happened since I went to sea, and I did not want to go again. I became a minister instead and a missionary."
"Well, I'm jiggered," said Gray, "but that's a corker of a yarn. Were you married when you were a seaman?"
"No," replied Ruddle; "I met my wife soon after I became my second and present self, and my remarkable story so interested her that we got married. It is interesting, isn't it?"
"And do you mean to say that you remember nothing whatever of the sea? Could you go aloft, for instance?"
Mr. Ruddle looked up aloft and shivered.
"Oh, I couldn't," he said. "The very look of the complicated apparatus with which I must have been once only too familiar fills me with peculiar horror."
"Well, I'm damned," said Gray. "What's the opposite point of the compass to sou'-east-by-sou'-half sou'-southerly?"
"I give it up. Tell me," said the minister simply.
Gray shook his head.
