he shore and headed for the open fiord. Erratic puffs
from the high land behind made her progress timorous at first, but
soon the fairway was reached and a true breeze from Flensburg and the
west took her in its friendly grip. Steadily she rustled down the
calm blue highway whose soft beauty was the introduction to a passage
in my life, short, but pregnant with moulding force, through stress
and strain, for me and others.

Davies was gradually resuming his natural self, with abstracted
intervals, in which he lashed the helm to finger a distant rope, with
such speed that the movements seemed simultaneous. Once he vanished,
only to reappear in an instant with a chart, which he studied, while
steering, with a success that its reluctant folds seemed to render
impossible. Waiting respectfully for his revival I had full time to
look about. The fiord here was about a mile broad. From the shore we
had left the hills rose steeply, but with no rugged grandeur; the
outlines were soft; there were green spaces and rich woods on the
lower slopes; a little white town was opening up in one place, and
scattered farms dotted the prospect. The other shore, which I could
just see, framed between the gunwale and the mainsail, as I sat
leaning against the hatchway, and sadly missing a deck-chair, was
lower and lonelier, though prosperous and pleasing to the eye.
Spacious pastures led up by slow degrees to ordered clusters of wood,
which hinted at the presence of some great manor house. Behind us,
Flensburg was settling into haze. Ahead, the scene was shut in by the
contours of hills, some clear, some dreamy and distant. Lastly, a
single glimpse of water shining between the folds of hill far away
hinted at spaces of distant sea of which this was but a secluded
inlet. Everywhere was that peculiar charm engendered by the
association of quiet pastoral country and a homely human atmosphere
with a branch of the great ocean that bathes all the shores of our
globe.

There was another charm in the scene, due to the way in which I was
viewing it--not as a pampered passenger on a 'fine steam yacht', or
even on 'a powerful modern schooner', as the yacht agents advertise,
but from the deck of a scrubby little craft of doubtful build and
distressing plainness, which yet had smelt her persistent way to this
distant fiord through I knew not what of difficulty and danger, with
no apparent motive in her single occupant, who talked as vaguely and
unconcerne