all get them in time, and I fancy it will be long ere they give them
up. One West Country mate announced that "a gun is a handy thing to
have aboard--always." "But in peacetime?" I said. "Wouldn't it be in
the way?"

"We'm used to 'em now," was the smiling answer. "Niver go to sea again
without a gun--_I_ wouldn't--if I had my way. It keeps all hands
pleased-like."

They talk about men in the Army who will never willingly go back to
civil life. What of the fishermen who have tasted something sharper
than salt water--and what of the young third and fourth mates who have
held independent commands for nine months past? One of them said to me
quite irrelevantly: "I used to be the animal that got up the trunks
for the women on baggage-days in the old Bodiam Castle," and he
mimicked their requests for "the large brown box," or "the black dress
basket," as a freed soul might scoff at his old life in the flesh.


"A COMMON SWEEPER"

My sponsor and chaperon in this Elizabethan world of
eighteenth-century seamen was an A.B. who had gone down in the
_Landrail_, assisted at the Heligoland fight, seen the _Blücher_ sink
and the bombs dropped on our boats when we tried to save the drowning
("Whereby," as he said, "those Germans died gottstrafin' their own
country because _we_ didn't wait to be strafed"), and has now found
more peaceful days in an Office ashore. He led me across many decks
from craft to craft to study the various appliances that they
specialise in. Almost our last was what a North Country trawler called