It was four o’clock on an August morning. Our little party had made the sleeping streets ring with jests and greetings, as it collected on the pier. Some dozen young men and women, sons and daughters of the wealthier coasting captains and owners of fishing-smacks, chaperoned by our old landlord, whose delicate and gentlemanlike features and figure were strangely at variance with the history of his life,—daring smuggler, daring man-of-war sailor, and then most daring and successful of coastguard-men. After years of fighting and shipwreck and creeping for kegs of brandy; after having seen, too—sight not to be forgotten—the Walcheren dykes and the Walcheren fever, through weary months of pestilence, he had come back with a little fortune of prize-money to be a village oracle, loving and beloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had never ‘stato al inferno,’ and looked Death in the face. Heaven bless thee, shrewd loyal heart, a gentleman of God’s making, not unrecognized either by many of men’s making. The other chaperone was a lady of God’s making, too; one who might have been a St. Theresa, had she been born there and then; but as it was, had been fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, and, like Deborah, ‘a mother in Israel.’ With her tall, slim, queenly figure, massive forehead, glittering eyes, features beaming with tenderness and enthusiasm, and yet overcast with a peculiar expression of self-consciousness and restraint, well known to those who have studied the physiognomies of ‘saints,’ she seemed to want only the dress of some monastic order to make her the ideal of a mediæval abbess, watching with a half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a group of innocent young worldlings. I saw Claude gazing at her full of admiration and surprise, which latter was certainly not decreased when, as soon as all had settled themselves comfortably on board, and the cutter was slipping quietly away under the magnificent deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess, pulling out her Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently as a matter of course. With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another arose; then a man gained courage, and chimed in with a full harmonious bass; then a rich sad alto made itself heard, as it wandered in and out between the voices of the men and women; and at last a wild mellow tenor, which we discovered after much searching to proceed from the most unlikely-looking lips of an old dry, weather-bleared, mummified chrysalis of a man, who stood aft, steering with his legs, and showing no sign of life except when he slowly and solemnly filled his nose with snuff.