Cowes makes the Mecca of the yachtsman, as St Andrews of the golfer. It is the most famous station of those idle craft that in our day diverge into two different forms--the steam vessels, models of comfort and elegance, even luxury, some of them fitted for making pleasure-cruises all over the world; and the mere sailing boats, that seem utterly useless but as racing machines to skim like butterflies over some quiet sea, with their decks as often as not half under water--“a sort of metal torpedo with two or three balloons fixed on to it.” This is a pastime as expensive as the turf, and sometimes as unsatisfactory to the amateurs who seek social glory thereby. Not all the gentlemen who swagger about in blue jackets here are so much at home on the ocean wave as for the nonce they would fain appear. Not all those big and smart craft so much admired in the roads of Cowes are very familiar with the breeze or the billow of the open sea. The sailing masters and crews of some of them must have a good easy time of it; and one suspects they prefer being in the service of a fine-weather sailor, whose purse is his main qualification for seamanship, to taking orders from some old salt who knows the ropes as well as they do. We remember Jack Brag and his skipper Bung. But there are yachtsmen of another school, whose blood has the salt in it that goes so far to make England what it is, men who, without having the means to own idle vessels, dearly love playing the mariner in good earnest, and can spend no happier holiday than in working some small craft with their own hands, taking rough and smooth as it comes, getting health and pleasure out of return for a month or so to something like the old Viking life, and all its tingling charm of a struggle with the forces of nature. Sailors of this stamp can here buy or hire craft of all kinds, but perhaps more cheaply at other ports on the Solent, for it is not only at regatta-time that Cowes has a name for high charges. The Solent with its almost landlocked waters, its many creeks, and its havens of refuge never more than a few miles off, makes a good cruising-ground for small craft such as can be sailed by the owner with the help of one or two hands working for love or money. Yet there are special difficulties here in the broken shore-line, the shifting banks, the shallows, and the treacherous currents, that call for some nautical ability, and even local experience to interpret the many buoys and beacons marking the channels of a watery labyrinth. The chief danger, apart from an occasional rough sea and squalls to be looked out for through openings in the land, is the violence of the tides, that encounter one another from each end of the Solent, so as to produce the peculiar result of a double high water--the ebb, after an hour or so, being driven back up to Southampton by a fresh flow.