atmen consult;
hungry children and sometimes reproachful wives wait at home for money
to purchase the morning meal. 'Shall we chance it?' say they. _They_
take the tobacco, and the first coastguardsman ashore takes _them_,
tobacco and all, before the magistrates, and I sometimes have been sent
for to the 'lock-up,' to find three or four misguided fellows in the
grasp of the law of their country, which poverty and opportunity and
temptation have led them to violate.

At present a large number of galley punts lie on Deal beach. These
boats carry one lugsail on a mast shipped well amidships. These boats
vary in size from twenty-one feet to thirty feet in length, and seven
feet beam, and as the Mission boat which I have steered for thirteen
years, as Missions to Seamen Chaplain for the Downs, is a small galley
punt, I take a peculiar interest in their rig and behaviour.

The galley punts are powerful seaboats; when close reefed can stand a
great deal of heavy weather, and are the marvel of the vessels in
distress which they succour.

All the Deal boats, the lifeboats of course excepted, are clinker built
and of yellow colour, the natural elm being only varnished. And it is
fine to see on a stormy day the splendid way in which they are handled,
visible one moment on the crest and the next hidden in the trough of a
wave, or launched or beached on the open shingle in some towering sea.

I have been breathless with anxiety as I have watched the launch of
these boats into a heavy sea with a long dreadful recoil, but the
landing is still more dangerous.

If you wait long enough when launching, you can get a smooth, or a
comparatively smooth, sea. I have sometimes waited ten minutes--and
then the command is given 'Let her go,' and the boat is hurled into the
racing curl of some green sea.

Sometimes the sea is too heavy for landing, and the galley punts lie
off skimming about for hours. Sometimes if the weather looks
threatening it is best to come at once, and then, supposing a heavy
easterly sea, you must clap on a press of sail to drive the boat. You
get ready a bow painter and a stern rope, and the boat, like a bolt set
free, flies to the land. Very probably she takes a 'shooter,' that is,
gets her nose down and her stern and rudder high into the air, and, all
hands sitting aft, she is carried along amidst the hiss and burst of
the very crest of the galloping billow. Fortunate are they if this
wave holds the bo