During our stay at Boulogne there was some very heavy weather. A strong sou’-wester came on one night, and by two o’clock next day, when I went down, was hurling the angry green waves against the great beams of the southern pier in fearful fashion. The entrance to the harbour, as most of your readers will remember, is quite narrow, not one hundred yards across between the two pier heads. The ebb-tide was sweeping down from the north, and, meeting the gale right off the harbour’s mouth, made a battling and raging sea which brought one’s heart into one’s mouth to look at. The weather was quite bright, and though the wind was so strong that I held my hat on with difficulty, the northern pier was crowded, as the whole force of the sea was spent against the southern pier, over which it was leaping every moment. We were in comparative shelter, and could watch, Without being drenched with spray, the approach of one of the fishing smacks of the port, which was coming home. I shall not easily forget the sight. We stood there, jammed together, rough sailors, fishwomen, Cockneys, weatherbound soldiers, well-dressed ladies, a crowd of all ranks, the wind singing through us so that we could scarcely make our nearest neighbours hear. Not that we wanted to talk. The sight of the small black hull and ruddy brown sail of the smack, now rising on the crest of a great wave, and the next moment all but disappearing behind it, took away the desire, almost the power, of speech. Two boats, manned with fishermen, pulled to the harbour’s mouth, and lay rolling in the comparatively still water just within the shelter of the southern pier head. It was comforting to see them there, though if any catastrophe had happened they could never have lived in that sea. But the gallant little smack needed no help. She was magnificently steered, and came dancing through the wildest part of the race without shipping a single sea, seeming to catch each leaping wave just in the spot where it was easiest to ride over. As she slid out of the seething cauldron into the smooth water past the waiting boats the crowd drew a long breath, and many of us hurried back to get a close view of her as she ran into her place amongst the other fishing boats alongside the quay. I envied the grizzly old hero at the helm, as he left his place, threw off his dreadnought coat, and went to help the two men and two boys who were taking in the sail and coiling away the ropes. There was much shouting and congratulation from above; but they made little answer, and no fuss. Their faces struck me very much, especially the boys’, which were full of that quiet self-contained look one sees in Hook’s pictures. There was no other boat in the offing then, so I went home; but within a few hours heard that a smack had capsized in the harbour’s mouth, with the loss of one man. I only marvel how the rest could have been saved.