hat with this
abstemious race--the pilots would pass the time stamping their feet on
the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped fingers. One
or two misanthropists would sit apart perched on boulders like man-like
sea-fowl of solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip
scandalously in little gesticulating knots; and there would be
perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon
with the long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
brandishing and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a short
turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boatful
of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer for the old Phoenician
port, dominated, watched over from the ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by
the red-and-white-striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde.

All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very
recent experience. But also something not foreseen by me did happen,
something which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots. It
was on this occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side
of an English ship.

No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught
got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy
with a clean, colourless light. It was while we were all ashore on the
islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like
an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to
her water-line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of
smoke slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and
headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an
hour.

She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met
on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super structures,
powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two
hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear was not a matter of
course in these days--and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in
thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peaked 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 En