ndfold business is conducted. "And then," he
ended, "there's always what _he'll_ do. You've got to think that out
for yourself--while you're working above him--same as if 'twas fish."
I should not care to be hunted for the life in shallow waters by a man
who knows every bank and pothole of them, even if I had not killed his
friends the week before. Being nearly all fishermen they discuss their
work in terms of fish, and put in their leisure fishing overside, when
they sometimes pull up ghastly souvenirs. But they all want guns.
Those who have three-pounders clamour for sixes; sixes for twelves;
and the twelve-pound aristocracy dream of four-inchers on
anti-aircraft mountings for the benefit of roving Zeppelins. They will
all get them in time, and I fancy it will be long ere they give them
up. One West Country mate announced that "a gun is a handy thing to
have aboard--always." "But in peacetime?" I said. "Wouldn't it be in
the way?"

"We'm used to 'em now," was the smiling answer. "Niver go to sea again
without a gun--_I_ wouldn't--if I had my way. It keeps all hands
pleased-like."

They talk about men in the Army who will never willingly go back to
civil life. What of the fishermen who have tasted something sharper
than salt water--and what of the young third and fourth mates who have
held independent commands for nine months past? One of them said to me
quite irrelevantly: "I used to be the animal that got up the trunks
for the women on baggage-days in the old Bodiam Castle," and he
mimicked their requests for "the large brown box," or "the black dress
basket," as a freed soul might scoff at his old life in the flesh.

"A COMMON SWEEPER"

My sponsor and chaperon in this Elizabethan world of
eighteenth-century seamen was an A.B. who had gone down in the
_Landrail_, assisted at the Heligoland fight, seen the _Bluecher_ sink
and the bombs dropped on our boats when we tried to save the drowning
("Whereby," as he said, "those Germans died gottstrafin' their own
country because _we_ didn't wait to be strafed"), and has now found
more peaceful days in an Office ashore. He led me across many decks
from craft to craft to study the various appliances that they
specialise in. Almost our last was what a North Country trawler called
a "common sweeper," that is to say, a mine-sweeper. She was at tea in
her shirt-sleeves, and she protested loudly that there was "nothing in
sweeping." "'See that wire rope?" she said. "Well, it