became audible, persistent, unnoticed. The cowled grandfather

was very much entertained somewhere within his hood.
He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved

the least bit. He had remained quietly in his place against the
foot of the mast. I had been given to understand long before

that he had the rating of a second-class able seaman (matelot
leger) in the fleet which sailed from Toulon for the conquest of

Algeria in the year of grace 1830. And, indeed, I had seen and
examined one of the buttons of his old brown patched coat, the

only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin, with
the words Equipages de ligne engraved on it. That sort of

button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons.
"I preserved it from the time of my Navy Service," he explained,

nodding rapidly his frail, vulture-like head. It was not very
likely that he had picked up that relic in the street. He looked

certainly old enough to have fought at Trafalgar--or at any rate
to have played his little part there as a powder-monkey. Shortly

after we had been introduced he had informed me in a Franco-
Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless jaws,

that when he was a "shaver no higher than that" he had seen the
Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba. It was at night, he

narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and
Antibes in the open country. A big fire had been lit at the side

of the cross-roads. The population from several villages had
collected there, old and young--down to the very children in

arms, because the women had refused to stay at home. Tall
soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood in a circle facing the

people silently, and their stern eyes and big moustaches were
enough to make everybody keep at a distance. He, "being an

impudent little shaver," wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on
his hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs,

and peeping through discovered standingperfectly still in the
light of the fire "a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat,

buttoned up in a long straight coat, with a big pale face,
inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest. His

hands were clasped behind his back. . .It appears that this was
the Emperor," the Ancient commented with a faint sigh. He was

staring from the ground with all his might, when "my poor
father," who had been searching for his boy frantically

everywhere, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.
The tale seems an authenticrecollection. He related it to me

many times, using the very same words. The grandfather honoured
me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection. Extremes

touch. He was the oldest member by a long way in that Company,
and I was, if I may say so, its temporarily adopted baby. He had

been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember;
thirty--forty years. He did not seem certain himself, but it

could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the Pilot-
office. He had been pensioned off years before, but he went out

from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the Company
once confided to me in a whisper, "the old chap did no harm. He

was not in the way." They treated him with rough deference. One
and another would address some insignificant remark to him now

and again, but nobody really took any notice of what he had to
say. He had survived his strength, his usefulness, his very

wisdom. He wore long, green, worsted stockings, pulled up above
the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen nightcap on his

hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet. Without his
hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen hands would

be extended to help him on board, but afterwards he was left
pretty much to his own thoughts. Of course he never did any

work, except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed: "He,
l'Ancien! let go the halyards there, at your hand"--or some such

request of an easy kind.
No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow

of the hood. He kept it up for a long time with intense
enjoyment. Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of

mind which is easily amused. But when his hilarity had exhausted
itself, he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but

quavering voice:
"Can't expect much work on a night like this."

No one took it up. It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas
could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy

splendour and spiritualstillness. We would have to glide idly
to and fro, keeping our station within the appointed bearings,

and, unless a fresh breezesprang up with the dawn, we would land
before sunrise on a small islet that, within two miles of us,

shone like a lump of frozenmoonlight, to "break a crust and take
a pull at the wine bottle." I was familiar with the procedure.

The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth

amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood. The crust
broken, and the mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no

more than that with this abstemious race--the pilots would pass
the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and

blowing into their nipped fingers. One or two misanthropists
would sit apart perched on boulders like man-like sea-fowl of

solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip scandalously
in little gesticulating knots; and there would be perpetually one

or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with the
long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking

piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
brandishing and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a

short turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours)
another boatful of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer

for the old Phoenician port, dominated, watched over from the
ridge of a dust-grey arid hill by the red-and-white-striped pile

of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my

very recent experience. But also something not foreseen by me
did happen, something which causes me to remember my last outing

with the pilots. It was on this occasion that my hand touched,
for the first time, the side of an English ship.

No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little
draught got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became

bright and glassy with a clean, colourless light. It was while
we were all ashore on the islet that a steamer was picked up by

the telescope, a black speck like an insect posed on the hard
edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to her water-line and

came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke
slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and

headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles
an hour.

She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be
met on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super-

structures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards
on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear

was not a matter of course in these days--and with them on the
bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced,

muffled up, with peaked caps--I suppose all her officers. There
are ships I have met more than once and known well by sight whose

names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once so
many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I have

not forgotten. How could I--the first English ship on whose side
I ever laid my hand! The name--I read it letter by letter on the

bow--was "James Westoll." Not very romantic you will say. The
name of a very considerable, well-known and universally respected

North-country shipowner, I believe. James Westoll! What better
name could an honourable hard-working ship have? To me the very

grouping of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her
reality as I saw her floating motionless, and borrowing an ideal

grace from the austerepurity of the light.
We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I

volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to