Explore "Tide Marks" by H.M. Tomlinson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Before this book is done I shall have to speak of Maguire; and it had better be here while there is nothing else to do. Borneo is on one side of us and Celebes on the other, and I don't know which the _Savoe_ will visit next, for both are at the same distance, and she appears to be heading for neither.
I had heard of Maguire in the most unlikely places. His name would slip into a conversation early and naturally, but, so far as I could see, without occasion. It might have been waiting about, in the air, in the shadows, ready to take any excuse for prolonging its mortality. "Once when I was with Maguire... " It was always supposed that I must know him. There was never a prelude, no hint of a face or a figure. Everybody ought to know Maguire, I had to suppose, or else lose the richness of the stories about him. But I had never met Maguire, and nothing that I was told of him made me feel that in him something rare had eluded me. For nothing was ever said which made him plain. Yet this man had so impressed himself upon those who knew him that they could not pass a few odd days with a stranger in a coasting steamer or a government rest-house without thinking of him.