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&mdash;a new six-inch hawser&mdash;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&rsquo;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&mdash;thump&mdash;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&mdash;Oh!&mdash;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. &lsquo;Are you all right?&rsquo; he says, looking hard at me. &lsquo;Yes, father.&rsquo; &lsquo;Quite sure?&rsquo; &lsquo;Yes, father.&rsquo; &lsquo;Well, then good-bye, my boy.&rsquo; 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 of the family&mdash;you know,&rdquo; added the man in tweeds, stroking his moustache with an ingenuous smile. </p> <p> I acknowledged this interesting communication by a sympathetic murmur. He waved his hand carelessly. </p> <p> &ldquo;This might have utterly spoiled a chap&rsquo;s nerve for going aloft, you know&mdash;utterly. He fell within two feet of me, cracking his head on a mooring-bitt. Never moved. Stone dead. Nice looking little fellow, he was. I had just been thinking we would be great chums. However, that wasn&rsquo;t yet the worst that brute of a ship could do. I served in her three years of my time, and then I got transferred to the Lucy Apse, for a year. The sailmaker we had in the Apse Family turned up there, too, and I remember him saying to me one evening, after we had been a week at sea: Isn&rsquo;t she a meek little ship?&rsquo; No wonder we thought the Lucy Apse a dear, meek, little ship after getting clear of that big, rampaging savage brute. It was like heaven. Her officers seemed to me the restfullest lot of men on earth. To me who had