wered
so that they could understand, and on this account I was very grieved to
hear the Catalan tongue, though I remembered that if I spoke to them
with ordinary Spanish words or in French with a strong Southern accent
they would usually have some idea of what I was saying.

As the evening fell the cables were slipped without songs, and with
great dignity, rapidity, and order the ship was got away.

I knew a man once, a seafaring man, a Scotchman, with whom I travelled
on a very slow old boat in the Atlantic, who told me that the Northern
people of Europe were bravest in a unexpected danger, but the Southern
in a danger long foreseen. He said he had known many of both kinds, and
had served under them and commanded them. He said that in sudden
accident the Northerner was the more reliable man, but that if an act of
great danger had to be planned and coolly achieved, then the Southerner
was strongest in doing what he had to do. He said that in taking the
ground he would rather have a Northern, but in bringing in a short ship
a Southern crew.

He was a man who observed closely, and never said a thing because he had
read it. Indeed, he did not read, and he had in a little hanging shelf
above his bunk only four or five tattered books, and even these were
magazines. I remembered his testimony now as I watched these Catalans
letting the ship go free, and I believed it, comparing it with history
and the things I had myself seen. They did everything with such
regularity and so silently that it was a different deck from what one
would have had in the heave of the Channel. With Normans or Bretons, or
Cornishmen or men of Kent, but especially with men from London river,
there would have been all sorts of cursing and bellowing, and they could
not have touched a rope without throwing themselves into attitudes of
violence. But these men took the sea quite quietly, nor could you tell
from their faces which was rich and which was poor.

It was not till the ship was out throbbing swiftly Over the smooth sea
and darkness had fallen that they began to sing. Then those of them who
were not working gathered together with a stringed instrument forward
and sang of pity and of death. One of them said to me, "Knight, can your
grace sing?" I told him that I could sing, certainly, but that my
singing was unpleasing, and that I only knew foreign songs. He said that
singing was a great solace, and desired to hear a song of my own
country. So I s