ed away he roused himself
enough to ask if I would use his smack. He pointed to it where it lay a
little way out--a big boat with the bright brown sails that make such
brilliant splashes of colour in the surrounding blues and whites. There
was only a faint breeze, but he said he could get me across in twenty
minutes and would wait for me all day if I liked, and would only charge
three marks. Three marks for a whole fishing-smack with golden sails,
and a fisherman with a golden beard, blue eyes, stalwart body, and whose
remote grandparents had certainly been Vikings! I got into his dinghy
without further argument, and was rowed across to the smack. A small
Viking, appropriately beardless, he being only ten, but with freckles,
put his head out of the cabin as we drew alongside, and was presented to
me as the eldest of five sons. Father and son made a comfortable place
for me in a not too fishy part of the boat, hauled up the huge poetic
sail, and we glided out beyond the jetty. This is the proper way, the
only right way, to visit Vilm, the most romantic of tiny islands. Who
would go to it any other way but with a Viking and a golden sail? Yet
there is another way, I found out, and it is the one most used. It is a
small launch plying between Lauterbach and Vilm, worked by a machine
that smells very nasty and makes a great noise; and as it is a long
narrow boat. If there are even small waves it rolls so much that the
female passengers, and sometimes even the male, scream. Also the spray
flies over it and drenches you. In calm weather it crosses swiftly,
doing the distance in ten minutes. My smack took twenty to get there and
much longer to get back, but what a difference in the joy! The puffing
little launch rushed past us when we were midway, when I should not have
known that we were moving but for the slight shining ripple across the
bows, and the thud of its machine and the smell of its benzine were
noticeable for a long time after it had dwindled to a dot. The people in
it certainly got to their destination quickly, but Vilm is not a place
to hurry to. There is nothing whatever on it to attract the hurried. To
rush across the sea to it and back again to one's train at Lauterbach is
not to have felt its singular charm. It is a place to dream away a
summer in; but the wide-awake tourist visiting it between two trains
would hardly know how to fill up the three hours allotted him. You can
walk right round it in three-quarters