“Aye, easy to carry. _Here’s_ the spot,” and he marked it with a circled dot. Then we “dead reckoned” the latitude from the noon sight, and “shot” for the longitude as we “came to the Union Bank.” And finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined from hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B---- must start the lead going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget the way his face lit up when the leadsmen droned out “Fourteen,” and there were tears glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read-- “And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where she sank.” “I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to the soundings!” The margins of “The _Mary Gloster_,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the pencilled records--now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs--of our “mid-sea madness” to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure more. B---- would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the uncrowned Laureate” than have any others. For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling, now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the recollection of how kind old N----, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack. N---- was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up. It was R----, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked. And it was H----, of the big White Star freighter on the Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D----, of the Rangoon-Calcutta “B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while ashore at Akyab; and it was A----, of the Lynch river boat plying from Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”