channel grudgingly disclosed itself, stealing between marshes and
meadows and then broadening to a mere, as at Ekken. We anchored close
to the mouth, and not far from a group of vessels of a type that
afterwards grew very familiar to me. They were sailing-barges,
something like those that ply in the Thames, bluff-bowed,
high-sterned craft of about fifty tons, ketch-rigged, and fitted with
lee-boards, very light spars, and a long tip-tilted bowsprit. (For
the future I shall call them 'galliots'.) Otherwise the only sign of
life was a solitary white house--the pilot's house, the chart told
us--close to the northern point of entrance. After tea we called on
the pilot. Patriarchally installed before a roaring stove, in the
company of a buxom bustling daughter-in-law and some rosy
grandchildren, we found a rotund and rubicund person, who greeted us
with a hoarse roar of welcome in German, which instantly changed,
when he saw us, to the funniest broken English, spoken with intense
relish and pride. We explained ourselves and our mission as well as
we could through the hospitable interruptions caused by beer and the
strains of a huge musical box, which had been set going in honour of
our arrival. Needless to say, I was read like a book at once, and
fell into the part of listener.

'Yes, yes,' he said, 'all right. There is plenty ducks, but first we
will drink a glass beer; then we will shift your ship, captain--she
lies not good there.' (Davies started up in a panic, but was waved
back to his beer.) 'Then we will drink together another glass beer;
then we will talk of ducks--no, then we will kill ducks--that is
better. Then we will have plenty glasses beer.'

This was an unexpected climax, and promised well for our prospects.
And the programme was fully carried out. After the beer our host was