do what he pleased, an unfortunate marriage gave him a
distaste for High Civilization, and his scientific bent and passion for
the sea--inherited with a strain of old Norse blood--did the rest.

He had chosen well. Cards, women and wine, pleasure and the glittering
things of life, all these betray one, but the sea, though she may kill,
never leaves a man broken, never destroys his soul.

But Eugene Henry William of Selm for all this sea passion might have
remained a landsman, for the simple reason that he was one of those
thorough souls for whom Life and an Object are synonymous terms. In
other words he would never have made a yachtsman, a creature shifting
from Keil to Cowes and Cowes to Naples according to season, a cup
gatherer and club-house haunter.

But Exploration gave him the incentive and the Musee Oceanographique of
Monaco his inspiration, limitless wealth supplied the means.

The _Gaston de Paris_ built by Viguard of Toulon was an ocean going
steam yacht of twelve hundred and fifty tons with engines by Conturier
of Nantes and everything of the latest from Conturier's twin-action
centrifugal bilge pumps to the last thing in sea valves. She was
reckoned by those who knew her the finest sea-going yacht in the world
and she was certainly the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Lafiette, Viguard's chief
designer. Lafiette was more than a designer, he was a creator, the sea
was in his blood giving him that touch of genius or madness, that
something eccentric which made him at times cast rules and formulae
aside.

The decks of the _Gaston de Paris_ ran flush, with little encumbrance
save a deck-house forward given over to electrical and deep sea
instruments.

Forward of the engine room and right to the bulkheads of the fo'c'sle
ran a lower deck reached by a hatch aft of the instrument room. Here
were stowed the dredges and buoys and all the gear belonging to them,
trawl nets and deep sea traps, cable and spare rope and sounding-wire,
harpoons and grancs and a hundred odds and ends, all in order and spick
and span as the gear of a warship.

Aft of the engine-room the yacht was a little palace. Prince Selm would
labour like any of his crew over a net coming in or in an emergency, but
he ate off silver and slept between sheets of exceedingly fine linen.
Though a sailor, almost one might say a fisherman, he was always
Monsieur le Prince and though his hobby lay in the depths of the sea his
intellect did not lie there too. Polit