On a foggy, super-saturated day, the sails and the deck beaded and dripping, he will fairly rub his hands in ecstasy and exclaim: “Oh, what a fine day!” Or he will thrust his ruddy countenance out of his chart-room door to call: “Isn’t it great to be alive?” Off Cape Norman, when the foghorn was blaspheming and the sea ran high, I tried to get the Doctor to concede that it was half a gale, but he would only admit that it was a “nice breeze.” The new topsail stubbornly declined to blossom out as it should, though the five other sails were in full bloom. “We’ll burst it out,” said the Doctor. The offending sail was forthwith hauled down and stretched like a sick man on the deck; then it was tied in three places with tarry cords, the Doctor scurried up the mast, the sail was raised into place by means of the clanking winch, and then, with violent tugs of the fierce wind like a fish plucking at a tempting bait the three confining strings snapped in explosive succession and like a flag unfurling the sail sprang out to the breeze. We raised a cheer as the perceptible lift of the additional sail-cloth thrilled the timbers underfoot. You’d hear him trotting about the deck in the cool dawn inquiring about steam or tide and humming softly (or lifting with the fervour of a sailor’s chantey), that favourite Newfoundland hymn, written by a Newfoundlander, “We love the place, O God, wherein thine honour dwells.” In the wheelhouse as he looks out over the sea and guides the prow, as if it were a sculptor’s chisel, through calm or storm, there comes into his eyes a look as of communing with a far country: his soul has gone to a secret, distant coast where no man and but one woman can follow. Sometimes of an evening the Doctor brought out the chessboard and I saw another phase of his versatile entity—his fondness for an indoor game that is of science and not blind chance. The red and white ivory chessmen, in deference to the staggering ship, had sea-legs in the shape of pegs attaching them to the board. Two missing pawns—“prawns,” the Doctor humorously styled them—had as substitutes bits of a red birthday candle, and two of the rooks were made of green modelling-wax (plasticine). “I love to attack,” said the Doctor, and his tactics proved that he meant what he said. He has what Lord Northcliffe once named to me as the capital secret of success—concentration. When he has once moved a piece forward he almost never moves it back again. He likes to go ahead. He seeks to get his pieces out and into action, and a defensive, waiting game—the strategy of Fabius the Cunctator—is not for him.