And then the bargainer almost invariably submits, ungraciously enough with “All right, you ---- pirates,” or “beachcombers,” or something equally offensive. Strong language is cheap on the seas, and no one resents it, least of all the hovellers and the boatmen who have thus gained their point: it is all the harassed master has left him, and he may put his tongue to what strange curses he will, if it be any satisfaction. And then, at a carefully chosen moment, as the vessels large and small set to one another in a peculiarly violent kind of maritime dance and the boatmen’s little craft swings dizzily up on a wave alongside, a rope is thrown and one of the galley-punt’s crew clambers breathlessly aboard, dashes the brine from his eyes, and is ready to navigate his charge through the seething waters as surely as a cab-driver takes a fare through well-known streets. His companions, sitting like statues in the boat, in streaming yellow oilskins, fade away like ghosts in the turmoil, and make for home. Such are at those times the men you will see lounging the summer days on Deal beach and suggesting to visitors that it is a “fine day for a sail.” It looks a lazy life, this lounging, with hands in pockets, day after day, varied by an occasional turn with the tar-brush or paint-pot upon boat or timbered shanty; but it is really a life of one long waiting for something to turn up, and there is nothing else for it but to lounge hands in pockets. And to do the Deal boatmen the merest justice, they lounge extremely well. Do not mistake me: I do not mean that they do it elegantly. The figure of your typical ’longshoreman, bargelike and extremely solid, does not permit of that. No, I mean that he absolutely abandons himself to it. There used to be in London, and in society, the Bond Street and the Hyde Park lounge. I believe the exquisite _insouciance_ thus indicated is long since extinct. No one lounges now, in these days of motor-cars and general hustle; no one, that is to say, except the ’longshoremen of Deal and elsewhere, but here at Deal it is perfected. The lounge of Hyde Park--you may see it represented in _Punch_, in many of du Maurier’s drawings--was a graceful droop over the railings of the Row; but the lounger had always in the look of him a curious mixture of world-weariness and self-consciousness. He knew he was beautiful, as beautiful as his tailor and toilet-club could make him. Now the ’longshoreman cannot droop, gracefully or otherwise. He is not built that way. There is about him a breadth of beam and an appalling negation of waist that vehemently forbids the very thought of it. He is not beautiful, nor, on the other hand, is he self-conscious. He is of that solid bulk, despite his privations, poor chap, which makes the crazy old capstans on the beach creak and complain, and the tarred shanties shiver when he leans against them. And his costume has been the delight of serious artists and comic for at least a century.