.
'Oh,' I said, 'I--I think she's sinking.' He opened his eyes for about
two seconds and then said to me in a terrible voice just as a big sea
crashed over our heads and the ports spurted, 'Let her sink and be
damned!' he says and never stirred. I left him there. I ran back to the
engine room. I felt I couldn't stay and argue the point with a man who
would not make a fight for us, for himself.

"The Chief decided to cut holes in the suction pipe just under the
water-line. Then when the pumps sucked them clear, we bound them up with
jointing and cut more holes lower down. Oh! it was grand! For fourteen
hours we went on doing that, up to our shoulders in the bilge, the
grease caking on us in a fresh layer every time we climbed out to get
something in the store. The weather eased a little off Finisterre and we
got her righted. We went up to the Chief's room to have a nip of
whisky.

"'Ye see,' said the Second. 'Ye see, mister, there's some as dinna
care.'

"Old Croasan came out of the bunk when the trouble was over. I felt too
proud of what I'd been through to be hard on the poor old chap, proud of
being in the thick of it. I was seeing life at last. This was what I'd
come for. 'Ah,' says the Chief, his glass eye fixing me over his whisky
glass, 'you'll be marked if you stay on the _Corydon_.'

"I was. It took that old box of misfortune thirty-two days to make Port
Duluth. Every day we had some breakdown or other. She was like a good
many other ships that fly the Red Ensign, worn out. But did I grumble?
Not a bit of it. I looked at it as any man will who's got sand in him.
It was a fight. There was no fighting in Victoria Street; it was simply
riding through life on rubber tyres. Books, art, comfort, philosophy,
all these things are well enough; but the _Corydon_, the rusty, leaking,
treacherous old _Corydon_, with her starting rivets and banging old
engines, she was the real thing, the thing to mark a man and teach him
what he's made of.

"I don't suppose any of you people have ever heard of Port Duluth. I
certainly hadn't. When I asked where it was, the others told me it was
'up a creek.' In England this would have meant very little; but I had
learned from my mother to call even the Thames a creek, and so I was
able to swallow the apparent paradox of a seven-thousand-ton ship
insinuating herself up to what was known locally as 'a railhead.' When I
persisted and wanted to know the name of the creek, nobody knew, but