his has not happened to me for years." He repeated this
slowly at reasonable intervals. But he had lost the nimble impulse to
chat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocent
curiosity. As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke of
Billingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Dogger
till there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to get
more coal. From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl into
port, in such circumstances, without flags, and without singing. This
gave my first trip an appearance I had never expected. Imagination,
which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured the
Dogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cab
in London. A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk
it had left behind. But here we were with our ship plunging round the
compass merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like the
others,

But at last we had them. We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers. Their
admiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left "ours" at six
that morning twenty miles NNE., steaming west. It was then eleven
o'clock. Hopefully the _Windhover_ put about. We held on for three
hours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves. The skipper
then rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below.
The mate asked what course he should steer. "Take the damned ship where
you like," said the skipper. "I'm going to sleep." He was away ten
minutes. He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge.
The helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the wind had fallen, the seas
were more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight,
insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began to
fill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothing
to be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves.

6

There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprise
than to enjoy it that way instead. What did I care when they complained
at breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before? What did that
matter to me when the skylight above our morning coffee was open at last,
really open? Fine weather for December! Across that patch of blue,
which was a peep into eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanctity.
And did it matter if the imprints on our tablecloth of negroes' thumbs
were