've just shipped in
that there Apse Family. Blow her. She ain't going to scare us.' Sheer
sailorlike perversity! A sort of curiosity. Well--a little of all that,
no doubt. I put the question to them in the course of the voyage. The
answer of the elderly chap was:

"'A man can die but once.' The younger assured me in a mocking tone that
he wanted to see 'how she would do it this time.' But I tell you what;
there was a sort of fascination about the brute."

Jermyn, who seemed to have seen every ship in the world, broke in
sulkily:

"I saw her once out of this very window towing up the river; a great
black ugly thing, going along like a big hearse."

"Something sinister about her looks, wasn't there?" said the man in
tweeds, looking down at old Jermyn with a friendly eye. "I always had
a sort of horror of her. She gave me a beastly shock when I was no more
than fourteen, the very first day--nay, hour--I joined her. Father came
up to see me off, and was to go down to Gravesend with us. I was his
second boy to go to sea. My big brother was already an officer then. We.
got on board about eleven in the morning, and found the ship ready to
drop out of the basin, stern first. She had not moved three times her
own length when, at a little pluck the tug gave her to enter the dock
gates, she made one of her rampaging starts, and put such a weight on
the check rope--a new six-inch hawser--that forward there they had no
chance to ease it round in time, and it parted. I saw the broken end fly
up high in the air, and the next moment that brute brought her quarter
against the pier-head with a jar that staggered everybody about her
decks. She didn't hurt herself. Not she! But one of the boys the
mate had sent aloft on the mizzen to do something, came down on the
poop-deck--thump--right in front of me. He was not much older than
myself. We had been grinning at each other only a few minutes before. He
must have been handling himself carelessly, not expecting to get such a
jerk. I heard his startled cry--Oh!--in a high treble as he felt himself
going, and looked up in time to see him go limp all over as he fell.
Ough! Poor father was remarkably white about the gills when we shook
hands in Gravesend. 'Are you all right?' he says, looking hard at me.
'Yes, father.' 'Quite sure?' 'Yes, father.' 'Well, then good-bye, my
boy.' He told me afterwards that for half a word he would have carried
me off home with him there and then. I am the baby