CHAPTER I.

THE FIRST SHIP.

In those west-country parishes where but a few years back the feast of
Christmas Eve was usually prolonged with cake and cider, "crowding," and
"geese dancing," till the ancient carols ushered in the day, a certain
languor not seldom pervaded the services of the Church a few hours
later. Red eyes and heavy, young limbs hardly rested from the _Dashing
White Sergeant_ and _Sir Roger_, throats husky from a plurality of
causes--all these were recognised as proper to the season, and, in fact,
of a piece with the holly on the communion rails.

On a dark and stormy Christmas morning as far back as the first decade
of the century, this languor was neither more nor less apparent than
usual inside the small parish church of Ruan Lanihale, although
Christmas fell that year on a Sunday, and dancing should, by rights,
have ceased at midnight. The building stands high above a bleak
peninsula on the South Coast, and the congregation had struggled up with
heads slanted sou'-west against the weather that drove up the Channel in
a black fog. Now, having gained shelter, they quickly lost the glow of
endeavour, and mixed in pleasing stupor the humming of the storm in the
tower above, its intermittent onslaughts on the leadwork of the southern
windows, and the voice of Parson Babbage lifted now and again from the
chancel as if to correct the shambling pace of the choir in the west
gallery.

"Mark me," whispered Old Zeb Minards, crowder and leader of the
musicians, sitting back at the end of the Psalms, and eyeing his fiddle
dubiously; "If Sternhold be sober this morning, Hopkins be drunk as a