"And this, mind you, was no breakdown, no emergency, but just the ordinary day's work. If the owners didn't want to risk breaking the ship's back on the bar there were plenty of others who would. It was like putting a horse at a dyke, getting his fore-feet across, and then lashing him furiously until he had kicked a lot of earth away and finally got himself over. When I had put the doors on the ballast pump again I noticed the main engines were running normal once more. We were over. We had crossed the bar. My mind was running on the romantic nature of this performance when I went up to get my tea. I recalled Tennyson's poem and wondered what he would have thought of the old _Corydon_ and her undignified scramble across the bar. The others caught something of this in my face, I suppose, for the Second said to the Chief, 'I suppose the Fourth'll be for the beach to-night, eh?' and they laughed. 'Don't you go ashore here then?' I asked, and they laughed again. 'No, there's nothing to go ashore for,' said the Chief, and he fixed me with his eye. 'Why,' he added, 'don't you know where you are? You're in the middle of all the atrocities here.' The others nodded 'That's right. Any amount of atrocities--round here.' It seemed a silly way of putting it. Here we'd come thousands of miles just to get into the middle of atrocities! For a moment the word conveyed nothing to me. I had been getting into the way of thinking the _Corydon_ was by way of being something of an atrocity, but I knew that was not what my shipmates meant. I'm not sure even now that there ever had been any atrocities in that part of the world. I read about them in a book once; but the things that get into books have always eluded me. Already I had laid hold of that cardinal fact in my new life. The old ideas, the old conventional phrases and assumptions, were cumbersome, inadequate or untrue. Take that word 'atrocity.' Well enough in a radical leading article; but what core of real truth was there in it when it was used by a living man at a railhead up the Niger River? To anyone with imagination it was comic. But my shipmates were not given to much imagination. In the business of their lives they were alive and original and racy. They used phrases and turns of thought that sometimes thrilled me with their vivid power. But outside of that narrow channel they had nothing but newspaper phrases, like 'atrocities,' mere catchwords that chill one's soul with their bald, withered and bloodless pretensions. The Chief gave me an example of this after tea that night. For a brief spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees, were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth was behind us. In front lay a broad, placid sheet of copper-tinted, forest-rimmed water, the confluence of a number of stagnant creeks and