Bethge (1876-1946) was a minor poet and fiction writer, one of whose claims to fame was that Mahler used his poems in Das Lied von der Erde. The title story in this collection of novellas describes a journey by boat from Marseille to Veracruz and one of the passengers, an enigmatic Englishman and his even stranger companion, a yellow cat with a coat “almost like saffron.” The modest Jungstil volume was designed by the German artist Leo Prochownik.