“Single-’anded too, as you may say.  ’E’s a world’s wonder, that man.”

The children too thought it marvellous when they reached the deck and gazed about them.  They could spy no shore, not so much as a blur to indicate it, but were wrapped wholly in a grey fog; and down over the steamer’s tall sides (for she was returning light after delivering a cargo of Welsh coal) they stared upon nothing but muddy water crawling beneath the fog.

They heard the mate’s voice calling from the bridge, and the fog seemed to remove both bridge and voice to an immeasurable height above them.

It was just possible to descry the length of the ship, and they saw two figures bestir themselves forward.  A voice answered, “Aye, aye, sir!” but thickly and as if muffled by cotton wool.  One of the two men came running, halted amidships, lifted out a panel of the bulwarks, set in a slide between two white-painted stanchions, and let down an accommodation ladder.

“Evan Evans, ahoy!” came a voice from the fog.

“Ahoy, sir!” sang out the mate’s voice high overhead, and between two blasts of the whistle, and just at this moment a speck—­a small blur—­ hove out of the grey on the port side.  It was the skipper arriving in a shore boat.

The children dodged behind a deck-house as he came up the ladder—­a thin little man habited much like a Nonconformist minister, and wearing—­of all amazing head-gear—­a top-hat, the brim of which shed moisture in a steady trickle.  A grey plaid shawl swathed his shoulders, and the fringe of this dripped too, as he gained the deck and stepped briskly aft, without so much as a word to the men standing at the head of the ladder, to whom after a minute the mate called down.

“Sam Lloyd!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“What did ’e say?”

“Nothin’, sir.”

Apparently the children were not alone in finding this singular, for after another minute the mate descended from the bridge, walked aft, and followed his chief down the companion.  He stayed below for close on a quarter of an hour, the steamer all this while moving dead slow, with just a lazy turn now and then of her propeller.  When he returned it was with a bottle in his hand and a second bottle under his arm.

“Cracked as a drum,” he announced to the seaman Lloyd on his way back to the bridge.  “Says ’e’s ’ad a revelation.”

“A wot?”

“A revelation.  Says ’e ’eard a voice from ‘eaven las’ night, tellin’ ’im as Faith was dead in these times; that if a man only ’ad faith ’e could let everything else rip . . . and,” concluded the mate heavily, resting his unoccupied hand on the ladder, “‘e’s down below tryin’ it.”

The seaman did not answer.  The mate ascended again, and vanished in the fog.  After a pause a bell tinkled deep down in the bowels of the ship.  Her propeller began to churn the water, very slowly at first, then with gathering speed, and the Evan Evans forged ahead, shouldering her way deeper and deeper into the fog.