Just so--with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my own--had I leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers ploughing a hundred sea-ways, and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged themselves, one at a time, by my side. At first I tried to muster them chronologically, in the order I had known them from my first tentative coastal voyages in the Pacific--(B----, of the Vancouver-Seattle packet, who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the rooms were all taken in order that I might be rested for the tennis tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma on the morrow; R----, of the old Alaska “Inland Passage” coaster, who taught me to “box” the compass and awoke the slumbering love o’ the sea in my blood with tales of the Victoria sealing fleet; P----, of the Mexican trader, who smuggled me out of Guaymas when the Sonora authorities were trying to arrest me for landing on Tiburon without a permit)--but presently the magnet of my quickened memory began drawing them forward out of turn, and ere long they were crowding on like guests at a reception. Now I would think of the bravery of them, and instantly a series of pictures took shape before my eyes, a score of names leapt to my lips, a score of hands--hard brown hands, with a world of warmth in their steady grip--reached out to clasp my own. Who was the bravest among men that had all been brave? I asked myself; and then how the pictures formed and dissolved as one stirring incident after another flashed across my mind! What could have been finer than the way Captain K----, of that cranky clipper-bowed old “C.N.” steamer, had stuck out that typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge for three days, and subsisting on coffee and rum and pilot bread? I could see his brine-white face (as I saw it when I took a timid peep up the companion way on the day the “twister” began to die down) taking shape out there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that fearsome storm crystallised in my memory, and then fancy turned another cog, and it was a sun-blistered South Pacific trader that I seemed to see, with a sallow, fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and two or three dozen naked blacks writhing in agony on the forrard deck. How old B----, of the _Cora Andrews_, took his load of plague-stricken Papuans through the Barrier Reef and into the quarantine station at Townsville is a South Sea epic.