glish 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
shipowner, 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 breast-bone, 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 space of that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the
lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much. My course of reading, of dreaming
and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea-brother of that
sort. I never met again a figure in the least like his except in the
illustrations to Mr. W.W. Jacobs' most entertaining