bumping into the lock wall and gashing the bow. The air
was intensely cold, and the iron frameworks against the last tinges of
sunset and the red and white lights were now all there was to see of
our port of discharge. That episode was over; after midnight, the ship
stopped at Borkum to put down the pilot, and then, on again. My voyage
was hurrying into memory.

XXXI

Short seas running and a squally wind abeam made the light ship jerk and
roll. The early sun was hidden in the dull purple of a racing sleet-cloud,
which passed over the _Bonadventure_ and swept on to lash the dunes of
Holland lying dim blue along the yellow horizon. The engines beat out
a cheerful tattoo and sent the ship, wobbling as she went, at eleven
knots through the green water. The wind grew westerly but not sisterly;
the melancholy began to expatiate on the short text, "The Longships,"
but the profusion of fishing smacks out around us seemed to show that no
tempestuous weather was at hand.

The next morning, a spiritual Beachy Head was glittering like crystal
in the distance; while the head wind fell upon us, and momently a great
thud like the impact of a great shell shook the ship's sizable frame and
lifted her in see-saw style. I watched the south coast sliding by with
as much excitement as if I had been coming home on leave again. Meacock
was at his most picturesque with his reminiscences of a hard-case
ship called the _Guildhall_, but I could not retain what he told me,
with this distraction of English shores and skies about us. The general
scene recorded itself; of all the magnificent evenings which my voyage
had brought forth this was perhaps the nonpareil. The skies were of
tumultuous colour, requiring one of the old Dutch masters to observe, let
alone to reproduce. A bright brazen sun, throwing at his whim (as it
were) his vesture of clouds about him, burnt out below a pavement of
light ever seething with the leaping waves, and sometimes hidden,
sometimes emerging, lit the sky astern to a tawny glow, or left it
sullen as clay. Here, the horizon was an olive green, there, a blue
girdle; ships in stippled blackness tilted this way and that against it,
or nearer ploughed grey expanses; and above pillars and cliffs of
rocky cloud lifted themselves enormously into a firmament purpled or
kindled into wild flame.

So we hurtled along, the wind flawing, abeam, ahead. The great prow
mounted high against the sunset, or thrust like the he