out work for the next few days. There is no need to tire the general
reader with its intricacies, nor is there space to reproduce it for
the benefit of the instructed reader. For both classes the general
map should be sufficient, taken with the large-scale fragment _[See
Chart A]_ which gives a fair example of the region in detail. It will
be seen that the three broad fairways of the Jade, Weser, and Elbe
split up the sands into two main groups. The westernmost of these is
symmetrical in outline, an acute-angled triangle, very like a sharp
steel-shod pike, if you imagine the peninsula from which it springs
to be the wooden haft. The other is a huge congeries of banks, its
base resting on the Hanover coast, two of its sides tolerably clean
and even, and the third, that facing the north-west, ribboned and
lacerated by the fury of the sea, which has eaten out deep cavities
and struck hungry tentacles far into the interior. The whole
resembles an inverted E, or, better still, a rude fork, on whose
three deadly prongs, the Scharhorn Reef, the Knecht Sand, and the
Tegeler Flat, as on the no less deadly point of the pike, many a good
ship splinters herself in northerly gales. Following this simile, the
Hohenhörn bank, where Davies was wrecked, is one of those that lie
between the upper and middle prongs.

Our business was to explore the Pike and the Fork and the channels
which ramify through them. I use the general word 'channel', but in
fact they differ widely in character, and are called in German by
various names: Balje, Gat, Loch, Diep. Rinne. For my purpose I need
only divide them into two sorts -those which have water in them at
all states of the tide, and those which have not, which dry off, that
is, either wholly or partly at low-tide.

Davies explained that the latter would take most learning, and were