"Rum bloke," commented the pilot to himself, though aloud he offered no comment, being a man whose business it was to keep on good terms with everybody. So he dropped his newspapers to one of the mates, and applied himself to the details of the pilotage. Still, the pilot was right in saying that England was ringing with the news of Kettle's feat. The passengers of the Cunarder, with nothing much else to interest them, had come home thrilled and ringing with it. A smart New Yorker had got a "scoop" by slipping ashore at Queenstown and cabling a lavish account to the American Press Association, so that the first news reached London from the States. Followed Reuter's man and the Liverpool reporters on Prince's landing-stage, who came to glean copy as in the ordinary course of events, and they being spurred on by wires from London for full details, got down all the facts available, and imagined others. Parliament was not sitting, and there had been no newspaper sensation for a week, and, as a natural consequence, the papers came out next morning with accounts of the rescue varying from two columns to a page in length. It is one of the most wonderful attributes of the modern Press that it can, at any time between midnight and publishing hours, collate and elaborate the biography of a man who hitherto has been entirely obscure, and considering the speed of the work, and the difficulties which hedge it in, these lightning life sketches are often surprisingly full of accuracies. But let the frillings in this case be fact or fiction, there was no doubt that Kettle and his crew had saved a shipload of panic-stricken foreign emigrants, and (to help point the moral) within the year, in an almost similar case, another shipload had been drowned through that same blind, helpless, hopeless panic. The pride of race bubbled through the British Daily Press in prosaic long primer and double-leaded bourgeois. There was no saying aloud, "We rejoice that an Englishman has done this thing, after having it proved to us that it was above the foreigner's strength." The newspaper man does not rhapsodize. But the sentiment was there all the same, and it was that which actuated the sudden wave of enthusiasm which thrilled the country. [Illustration: STRANGERS CAME UP AND WRUNG KETTLE'S UNWILLING HAND.] The _Flamingo_ was worked into dock, and a cheering crowd surged aboard of her in unrestrainable thousands. Strangers came up and wrung Kettle's unwilling hand, and dropped tears on his coat-sleeve; and when he swore at them, they only wept the more and smiled through the drops. It was magnificent, splendid, gorgeous. Here was a man! Who said that England would ever lose her proud place among the nations when she could still find men like Oliver Kelly--or Kattle--or Cuttle, or whatever this man was called, amongst her obscure merchant captains?