ur ships; admiral from the Arabs, and hammock and
hurricane from the Caribs, through the Spaniards. But other words of our
seamen are as native to us as our grey weather, for we brought them with
other habits overseas from the North--words like hail, storm, sea, ship,
sail, strand, cliff, shower, mast, and flood.

To examine words in this manner is simply to invite trouble, as did the
man who assumed that "bending a sail" was done as one would bend a cane,
not knowing that the sailor uses that word in the original sense of
"fastening." Once, in my ignorance, I imagined "schooner" was of Dutch
origin, but was careful to refer to the invaluable Skeat. Only just in
time, though. And he says that the word was born on the Clyde, grew up in
New England, migrated to Holland, and then came back to us again. Once
upon a time (1713) at Gloucester, Massachusetts, a man was witnessing a
new fore-and-aft rigged vessel glide away on a trial trip, and exclaimed
"She scoons!" So all her kind were christened. Science of that kind is
almost as good as romance.

XIX. Illusions

FEBRUARY 15, 1919. Southwark Street is warehouses and railway bridges,
and at its best is not beautiful; but when at night it is a deep chasm
through which whirl cataracts of snow, and the paving is sludge, then, if
you are at one end of it, the other end is as far away as joy. I was at
one end of it, and at the other was my train, due to leave in ten
minutes. Yet as there was a strike, there might be no train, and so I
could not lose it; I had that consolation while judging that, with more
than half a mile of snow and squall intervening from the north-east, I
could not do the length of the street in ten minutes. So I surrendered
the train which might not run to whoever was able to catch it, and in
that instant of renunciation the dark body of a motor lorry skidded to
the kerb and stopped beside me. A voice that was as passionless as
destiny told me to hop up, if I were going towards the station. The
headlong lorry, the sombre masses of the buildings which were now
looming through the diminishing snow, and the winter's night, roused a
vision of another place, much like it, or else the snow and the night
made it seem like it, and so my uppermost thought became too personal,
unimportant, and curious for converse. All I said, as I took my place
beside the steering wheel, was: "It's a wretched night." (But I might
have been alone in the lorry. There was no im