then they will
soon find the means by which national honour is to be retrieved.
Half-a-dozen Englishmen are in danger of death in Africa, and we spend
millions of money because they are Britons, and to sustain the British
name; but thousands of Britons are living in wretchedness or dying in
misery just far enough from our doors not to be seen, and less heard of
than if they were in Zululand--to leave them as they now are is a
scandalous national disgrace which every true Englishman who knows the
facts is ashamed of and which, even if he ignores them at home, he is
forced to feel abroad by the taunts of strangers.

Already we wonder that we ever kept the Thames as a common sewer; our
sons will wonder, some day, that their fathers had a great human sink in
every great town reeking out crime, disease, and disloyalty on the whole
nation. I have seen the serfs in Russia, the slaves in Africa, the Jews
in Asia, and the negroes in America; but there are crowds of people in
England in a far worse plight than these--their very nearness to light,
and happiness, and comfort, makes their misery more disgraceful.

National honour may be a lower motive to work with than love to Christ or
love to man; but it moves more minds than either of these, and on a scale
large enough to relieve us from a national disgrace which will cling to
the nation until the nation rises in shamed earnest to shake it off.

CHAPTER V.

Cool--Fishwives--Iron-bound coast--Etretat--Ripples--Pilot-book--Hollow
water--Undecided--Stomach law--Becalmed--Cape la Heve--The breeze--Havre
de Grace--Crazy.

So much for Sunday thoughts; but after the day had ended, there happened
to me an absurd misery, of the kind considered to be comical, and so
beyond sympathy, but which must be told, and it happened thus:--

The little yawl being anchored in the harbour had also a long rope to the
quay, and by this I could draw her near the foot of an upright ladder of
iron bars fixed in the stones of the quay wall, an ordinary plan of
access in such cases. The pier-man promised faithfully to watch my boat
as the tide sunk (it was every moment more and more under his very nose),
and so to haul her about that she should not "ground" before my return;
yet, when I came back at night, her keel had sunk and sunk until it
reached the bottom, so she could not be moved with all our pulling.
Moreover the tide had gone out so far as to prevent any boat at all from
coming to the