“You are,” said the pilot.  “The papers are just full of you, Captain, all of them, from the Shipping Telegraph to the London Times.  The Cunard boat brought in the yarn.  A pilot out of my schooner took her up.”

“How do they spell the name?  Cuttle?”

“Well, I think it’s ‘Kattle’ mostly, though one paper has it ‘Kelly.’”

“Curse their cheek,” said the little sailor, flushing.  “I’d like to get hold of some of those blowsy editors that come smelling round the dock after yarns and drink, and wring their necks.”

“Starboard a point,” said the pilot, and when the quartermaster at the wheel had duly repeated the course, he turned to Kettle with some amusement.  “Blowsy or not, they don’t seem to have done you much harm this journey, Captain.  Why, they’re getting up subscriptions for you all round.  Shouldn’t wonder but what the Board of Trade even stands you a pair of binoculars.”

“I’m not a blessed mendicant,” said Kettle stiffly, “and as for the Board of Trade, they can stick their binoculars up their trousers.”  He walked to the other end of the bridge, and stood there chewing savagely at the butt end of his cigar.

“Rum bloke,” commented the pilot to himself, though aloud he offered no comment, being a man whose business it was to keep on good terms with everybody.  So he dropped his newspapers to one of the mates, and applied himself to the details of the pilotage.

Still, the pilot was right in saying that England was ringing with the news of Kettle’s feat.  The passengers of the Cunarder, with nothing much else to interest them, had come home thrilled and ringing with it.  A smart New Yorker had got a “scoop” by slipping ashore at Queenstown and cabling a lavish account to the American Press Association, so that the first news reached London from the States.  Followed Reuter’s man and the Liverpool reporters on Prince’s landing-stage, who came to glean copy as in the ordinary course of events, and they being spurred on by wires from London for full details, got down all the facts available, and imagined others.  Parliament was not sitting, and there had been no newspaper sensation for a week, and, as a natural consequence, the papers came out next morning with accounts of the rescue varying from two columns to a page in length.

It is one of the most wonderful attributes of the modern Press that it can, at any time between midnight and publishing hours, collate and elaborate the biography of a man who hitherto has been entirely obscure, and considering the speed of the work, and the difficulties which hedge it in, these lightning life sketches are often surprisingly full of accuracies.  But let the frillings in this case be fact or fiction, there was no doubt that Kettle and his crew had saved a shipload of panic-stricken foreign emigrants, and (to help point the moral) within the year, in an almost similar case, another shipload had been drowned through that