As character he was sterling stuff. His name was Anderson.
He had a fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice which matched that
something attractive in the whole man. Though he looked yet in the prime
of life, shoulders, chest, limbs untouched by decay, and though his hair
and moustache were only iron-grey, he was on board ship generally called
Old Andy by his fellows. He accepted the name with some complacency.
I made my enquiry at the highly-glazed entry office. The clerk on duty
opened an enormous ledger, and after running his finger down a page,
informed me that Anderson had gone to sea a week before, in a ship bound
round the Horn. Then, smiling at me, he added: "Old Andy. We know him
well, here. What a nice fellow!"
I, who knew what a "good man," in a sailor sense, he was, assented
without reserve. Heaven only knows when, if ever, he came back from that
voyage, to the Sailors' Home of which he was a faithful client.
I went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but sorry not to have seen
him; though, indeed, if I had, we would not have exchanged more than a
score of words, perhaps. He was not a talkative man, Old Andy, whose
affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that Sailors' Home, where the
staff understood and liked the sailors (those men without a home) and did
its duty by them with an unobtrusive tact, with a patient and humorous
sense of their idiosyncrasies, to which I hasten to testify now, when the
very existence of that institution is menaced after so many years of most
useful work.
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