lue
jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peak caps--I suppose all her
officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known well by
sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once
so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold, pale sunrise I have not
forgotten. How could I--the first English ship on whose side I ever
laid my hand! The name--I read it letter by letter on the bow--was
James Westoll. Not very romantic, you will say. The name of a very
considerable, well-known, and universally respected North country
ship-owner, I believe. James Westoll! What better name could an
honourable hard-working ship have? To me the very grouping of the
letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her
floating motionless and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere purity
of the light.

We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to
pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on
board while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us all
through the night, went on gliding gently past the black, glistening
length of the ship. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then
that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed
in English--the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long
friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of
ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued,
of remembered emotions--of my very dreams! And if (after being thus
fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not claim
it aloud as my own, then, at any rate, the speech of my children. Thus
small events grow memorable by the passage of time. As to the quality
of the address itself I cannot say it was very striking. Too short for
eloquence and devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the
three words "Look out there!" growled out huskily above my head.

It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy double
chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up very high,
even to the level of his breastbone, by a pair of braces quite exposed
to public view. As where he stood there was no bulwark, but only a
rail and stanchions, I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his
voluminous person from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat,
which sat like an absurd flanged cone on his big head. The grotesque and
massive