ople to us. They came down to see the
ship in London River. Old Gannet--it was Gannet, Prawle and Co.--used to
leave a ten-pound note on the Chief's wash-stand after he'd had a yarn
and a cigar. Young Gannet, home for the holidays from Winchester
College, would come down to St. Katherine's Dock and make himself
squiffy with Madeira the skipper had brought home from the Islands.
Prawle had been an office boy when old Gannet was young, and had worked
up to a partnership and married Daisy Gannet. Smartest man on the
Baltic Exchange, they used to say. Yes, their ships were fierce, but men
stayed in them. Even now, with old Gannet dead and Prawle retired, and
the management paying poor whiskey-soaked young Gannet three thousand a
year to keep out of the office, the old skippers and chiefs are still
ploughing the ocean for them. You see, we know their ways.

"I went to sea, and kept on at it. You might say it was force of habit,
for I must admit I could have had jobs ashore in those days. Not now.
But then I could. But it grows on one, going to sea. And I was making
friends. There's nothing like a ship-mate who is a friend. The mere fact
of you or him joining another ship and sailing away is nothing. When you
meet again you take up the tale where you dropped it, years before, half
the world away. But you must be young. It is impossible to weld
friendships when the heat of youth has gone out. Interests, family ties,
danger, sorrow, all may do something, but only when you are young can
you make the friendships that nothing can destroy."

Mr. Spenlove paused, and for a moment there was no sound save the purr
of the dynamos under their feet, the soft swish and suck of the waves
flowing in and out of the under-cut marble cliffs, and the steady tramp
of the Quartermaster patrolling to and fro at the gangway. One of the
noticeable points about Spenlove was that he fitted into no standard
gauge. Neither the Surgeon nor the Oxonian could "place" him precisely,
they would confess. Nor could the more experienced lieutenants, highly
certificated gentlemen from the Liverpool to New York Ferry steamers.
With unconscious humour they "wondered such a man should go to sea." The
notion that the sea should be peopled exclusively with moral and
intellectual derelicts dies hard. The fact was, Mr. Spenlove was a
connoisseur of humanity. He seemed to have met so many types that he
unconsciously addressed himself to the fundamentals. He took the
in