dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. The fishers were braw
carles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from the
chin-point, with hanging woollen caps. In every case I found below-decks
a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked _aquavit_, two of which I took
into the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a
forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two
knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their
islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another of
them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the _Boreal's_ liquid
air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a
stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to
jump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the
dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an
awful whisper: '_Anyone? Anyone?_' Nothing answered me: and when I went
up again, the _Boreal_ had drifted three yards beyond my reach. There
being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that
half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset
me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and
sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for the
ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.

Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boats
these, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers. Most of these, too, I
boarded. In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of the
Virgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boy
who had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now,
his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand. These
stalwart blue woollen blouses and tarpaulin sou'-westers lay in every
pose of death, every detail of feature and expression still perfectly
preserved. The sloops were all the same, all, all: with sing-song creaks