red in at the inn parlour; but nowhere could I see a trace of
Grimm. I examined every floating object in the harbour (they were
very few), dropped on to two lighters and pried under tarpaulins,
boarded a deserted tug and two or three clumsy rowboats tied up to a
mooring-post. Only one of these had the look of readiness, the rest
being devoid of oars and rowlocks; a discouraging state of things for
a prospective boat-lifter. It was the sight of these rowboats that
suggested a last and most distracting possibility, namely, that the
boat in waiting, if boat there were, might be not in the harbour at
all, but somewhere on the sands outside the dyke, where, at this high
state of the tide, it would have water and to spare. Back to the dyke
then; but as I peered seaward on the way, contingencies evaporated
and a solid fact supervened, for I saw the lights of a steamboat
approaching the harbour mouth. I had barely time to gain my coign of
vantage before she had swept in between the piers, and with a fitful
swizzling of her screw was turning and backing down to a berth just
ahead of one of the lighters, and not fifty feet from my
hiding-place. A deck-hand jumped ashore with a rope, while the man at
the wheel gave gruff directions. The vessel was a small tug, and the
man at the wheel disclosed his identity when, having rung off his
engines, he jumped ashore also, looked at his watch in the beam of
the sidelight, and walked towards the village. It was Grimm, by the
height and build--Grimm clad in a long tarpaulin coat and a
sou'wester. I watched him cross the shaft of light from the inn
window and disappear in the direction of the canal.

Another sailor now appeared and helped his fellow to tie up the tug.
The two together then went aft and began to set about some job whose
nature I could not determine. To emerge was perilous, so I set about
a job of my own, tearing open my bundle and pulling an oilskin jacket
and trousers over my clothes, and discarding my peaked cap for a
sou'-wester. This operation was prompted instantaneously by the garb
of two sailors, who in hauling on the forward warp came into the
field of the mast-head light.

It was something of a gymnastic masterpiece, since I was lying--or,
rather, standing aslant--on the rough sea-wall, with crannies of
brick for foothold and the water plashing below me; but then I had
not lived in the 'Dulcibella' for nothing. My chain of thought, I
fancy, was this--the tug is to c