mpulse. He bought a
fisherman's outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage
the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went
throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green
globes of the Mouse. The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him
good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o'clock the next night
far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on
the Dogger.

The _Willing Mind's_ boat came aboard the next morning and Captain
Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had
learnt that the smack was shorthanded.

"I can't put you ashore in Denmark," said Weeks knowingly. "There'll
be seven weeks, it's true, for things to blow over; but I'll have to
take you back to Yarmouth. And I can't afford a passenger. If you
come, you come as a hand. I mean to own my smack at the end of this
voyage."

Duncan climbed after him into the boat. The _Willing Mind_ had now
six for her crew, Weeks; his son Willie, a lad of sixteen; Upton,
the first hand; Deakin, the decky; Rall, the baker's assistant, and
Alexander Duncan. And of these six four were almost competent. Deakin,
it is true, was making his second voyage; but Willie Weeks, though
young, had begun early; and Upton, a man of forty, knew the banks and
currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks.

"It's all right," said the skipper, "if the weather holds." And for
a month the weather did hold, and the catches were good, and Duncan
learned a great deal. He learnt how to keep a night-watch from
midnight till eight in the morning, and then stay on deck till noon;
how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel, and how
to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to
lee; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it; to gauge the
leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in
the compass; above all, he learnt to love the boat like a live thing,
as a man loves his horse, and to want every scanty inch of brass on
her to shine.

But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea. He gazed out
at night across the rippling starlit water, and the smacks nestling
upon it, and asked of his God: "Is this all?" And his God answered
him.

The beginning of it was the sudden looming of ships upon the horizon,
very clear, till they looked like carved toys. The skipper got out his
accounts and totted up his catches, and the prices t