Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture inboard or overside—Hinchcliffe’s white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet’s nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed’s halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft’s back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell: the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking us for two hours, and—welt upon welt, chill as the grave—the drive of the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them. “Wonder why they’re always barks—always steel—always four-masted—an’ never less than two thousand tons. But they are,” said Pyecroft. He was out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and another man worked the whistle. “This fog is the best thing could ha’ happened to us,” said Moorshed. “It gives us our chance to run in on the quiet…. Hal-lo!” A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking itself into our forward rail. I saw Pyecroft’s arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed’s voice down the tube saying, “Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!” and Pyecroft’s cry, “Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we’ll be wrapped up in the rope.” 267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc’sle had already thrown out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark. Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her crew struck dumb. “Any luck?” said Moorshed politely. “Not till we met yeou,” was the answer. “The Lard he saved us from they big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be’e gwine tu with our fine new bobstay?” “Yah! You’ve had time to splice it by now,” said Pyecroft with contempt. “Aie; but we’m all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin’ twenty-seven knots, us reckoned it. Didn’t us, Albert?”