Through all that the enemy can set against them, the home-trade vessels proceed on their voyages. Their losses are heavy in numbers (if the sum of their tonnage be not great), but the press of short sea-carriers that passes up Channel or down shews no evidence that frightfulness achieves an effect in holding them, loath, at their moorings. There is freight enough for all. Every vessel that has a sound keel and a helm to steer her is actively employed. Old craft and odd are come on the sea to serve turn in our emergency. Barges and inland watermen, Hudson Bay sloops, whilom pleasure craft, mud-hoppers reshelled, hulks even, are used; if they can neither sail nor steam, the ropemakers can supply a hawser--there is trade and bargain for a tow. After peace-years of grinding competition with the freight-grabbing steam coasters, the sailing craft of the smaller ports have found a new prosperity, from which no risks can daunt them. Sailmakers and rigging-cutters, the block and spar makers, have taken up their old tools again, and the gallant little topsail schooners, brigantines, cutters, and ketches are out under canvas. The German boast that he can achieve victory by submarine policy could be nowhere more plainly refuted than in the War Channel that extends from the Thames to the Tyne. The evidence is there for all to judge. The seaway is foul with wrecks, foundered on beach and sandbar--the tide vexed by under-water obstructions. Topmast spars with whitened cordage whipping in the wind stand out above the swirl of the tides; a shattered bow-section or gaunt listed shell of a wrecked vessel sets the turn to a new shoal drift; crazy funnels, twisted and arake by the broken hulls below, stud the angles of the buoyage that marks the fairway. Disaster to our shipping is plainly shewn, grouped in a way that no figures or statistics could rival. But there is other evidence. Daybreak in the Channel gives light to a progress of seaworthy craft that seems in no way diminished by the worst that the enemy can do. He has failed, despite the sinister sea-marks that litter the fairway. Down the river estuaries and out from the sea-harbour and roadstead, the coasters still join in company through the channels. An unending procession; the grey seascape is never free of their whirling smoke-wreaths. Passing and turning in the deeps, they steam close to the red-rusted, shattered hulls of their sister ships. The gaunt masses of tortured steel stand out as monuments to an indomitable spirit--or to an influence that calls their sea-mates out to steer by the loom of their wreckage. PILOTS IF we may count antiquity and precedence a claim, the pilot is the real senior of our trade. Before the ship and her tackling--the rude coracle, setting across the river bars or steering on a short passage by sea-marks on the coast, before the oversea venturer with his guide in sun and star--the lodesman, who marked the deeps and the shallows.