go down in a fog,' said a young gentleman who was travelling for
pleasure. 'Chokes a man both ways, y' know.' We were comfortably
gathered in the smoking-room, the weather being too cold to venture
on the deck. Conversation naturally turned upon accidents of fog, the
horn tooting significantly in the pauses between the tales. I heard
of the wreck of the _Eric_, the cutting down of the _Strathnairn_
within half a mile of harbour, and the carrying away of the bow plates
of the _Sigismund_ outside Sandy Hook.

'It is astonishing,' said the man from Saigon, 'how many true stories
are put down as sea yarns. It makes a man almost shrink from telling
an anecdote.'

'Oh, please don't shrink on our account,' said the smoking-room with
one voice.

'It's not my own story,' said the man from Saigon. 'A fellow on a
Massageries boat told it me. He had been third officer of a sort on
a Geordie tramp--one of those lumbering, dish-bottomed coal-barges
where the machinery is tied up with a string and the plates are rivetted
with putty. The way he told his tale was this. The tramp had been
creeping along some sea or other with a chart ten years old and the
haziest sort of chronometers when she got into a fog--just such a fog
as we have now.'

Here the smoking-room turned round as one man, and looked through the
windows.

'In the man's own words, "just when the fog was thickest, the engines
broke down. They had been doing this for some weeks, and we were too