treated fairly to give you the "virtue" which is in them. The
anchor is an emblem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse than the
most fallacious of false hopes that ever lured men or nations into
a sense of security. And the sense of security, even the most
warranted, is a bad councillor. It is the sense which, like that
exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of
madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster. A seaman labouring
under an undue sense of security becomes at once worth hardly half
his salt. Therefore, of all my chief officers, the one I trusted
most was a man called B-. He had a red moustache, a lean face,
also red, and an uneasy eye. He was worth all his salt.

On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling
which was the outcome of the contact of our personalities, I
discover, without much surprise, a certain flavour of dislike.
Upon the whole, I think he was one of the most uncomfortable
shipmates possible for a young commander. If it is permissible to
criticise the absent, I should say he had a little too much of the
sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a seaman. He had an
extremely disturbing air of being everlastingly ready (even when
seated at table at my right hand before a plate of salt beef) to
grapple with some impending calamity. I must hasten to add that he
had also the other qualification necessary to make a trustworthy
seaman--that of an absolute confidence in himself. What was really
wrong with him was that he had these qualities in an unrestful
degree. His eternally watchful demeanour, his jerky, nervous talk,
even his, as it were, determined silences, seemed to imply--and, I
believe, they did imply--that to his mind the ship was never safe
in my hands. Such was the man who looked after the anchors of a
less than five-hundred-ton barque, my first command, now gone from