I should have been less than a man had I not thanked God for my escape. But it is in the sap of a tree to run upward in the spring, and in the blood of a man to live in the present and future, the past going for little; and I had not crouched two minutes on the thwart before the steady lurch of the boat outwards and seawards fixed my attention. From this to asking myself by what chance I had been saved, and who were the men who sat round me--and evinced no more curiosity about me than if they had been sent to the spot purely and simply to rescue me--was but a step. I took it, scanned them stealthily, and was far from reassured; the sea-garb was then new to me, and these wearers of it were the wildest of their class. The fog which enfolded us magnified their clumsy shoulders and great knitted night-caps and the tarry ringlets that hung in festoons about their scarred and tanned faces. The huge gnarled hands that swung to and fro with the oars were no more like human flesh than the sea-boots which the men wore, drawn high on their thighs. They had rings in their ears, and from all came a reek of tobacco, and salt-fish, and strange oaths; nor did it need the addition of the hanger and pistol which each wore in his belt to inform me that I had fallen once again among fierce and desperate men. Dismayed by all I saw, it yet surprised me that no one questioned me. He who sat in the stern of the boat, and seemed to be in command, had a whistle continually at his lips, and his eyes on the curtain of haze before us; but if the tiller and navigation of the boat took up his thoughts, there were others. These, however, were content to pull on in silence, eyeing me with dull brutish stares, until the fog lifting disclosed on a sudden the hull of a tall ship looming high beside us. A shrill piping came from it--a sound I had heard before, but taken to be the scream of a sea-bird; and this, as we drew up, was followed by a hail. The man by my side let his whistle fall that he might answer--which he did, in French. A moment later our boat grated against the heaving timbers, and I, looking up through the raw morning air, saw a man in a boat-cloak spring on the bulwarks and wave his hat. "Welcome!" he cried, lustily. "And God save the King! A near thing they tell me, sir. But come on board, come on board, and we shall see Dunquerque the sooner. Up with you, Sir John, if you please, and let us be gone with the fog, and no heel-taps!"