sings under the
lee-bow, saw the flashing harmonies of sea and sky; but sensuous
perception was deadened by nervousness. The yacht looked smaller than
ever outside the quiet fiord. The song of the foam seemed very near,
the wave crests aft very high. The novice in sailing clings
desperately to the thoughts of sailors--effective, prudent persons,
with a typical jargon and a typical dress, versed in local currents
and winds. I could not help missing this professional element.
Davies, as he sat grasping his beloved tiller, looked strikingly
efficient in his way, and supremely at home in his surroundings; but
he looked the amateur through and through, as with one hand, and (it
seemed) one eye, he wrestled with a spray-splashed chart half
unrolled on the deck beside him. All his casual ways returned to
me--his casual talk and that last adventurous voyage to the Baltic,
and the suspicions his reticence had aroused.

'Do you see a monument anywhere?' he said, all at once' and, before I
could answer; 'We must take another reef.' He let go of the tiller
and relit his pipe, while the yacht rounded sharply to, and in a
twinkling was tossing head to sea with loud claps of her canvas and
passionate jerks of her boom, as the wind leapt on its quarry, now
turning to hay, with redoubled force. The sting of spray in my eyes
and the Babel of noise dazed me; but Davies, with a pull on the
fore-sheet, soothed the tormented little ship, and left her coolly
sparring with the waves while he shortened sail and puffed his pipe.
An hour later the narrow vista of Als Sound was visible, with quiet
old Sonderburg sunning itself on the island shore, and the Dybbol
heights towering above--the Dybbol of bloody memory; scene of the
last desperate stand of the Danes in '64, ere the Prussians wrested
the two fair provinces from them.

'It's early to anchor, and I hate towns,' said Davies, as one section
of a lumbering pontoon bridge opened to give us passage. But I was
firm on the need for a walk, and got my way on condition that I
bought stores as well, and returned in time to admit of further
advance to a 'quiet anchorage'. Never did I step on the solid earth
with stranger feelings, partly due to relief from confinement, partly
to that sense of independence in travelling, which, for those who go
down to the sea in small ships, can make the foulest coal-port in
Northumbria seem attractive. And here I had fascinating Sonderburg,
with its broad-eaved