She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met on the sea no more, black hull, with low, white super structures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel—­steam steering-gear was not a matter of course in these days—­and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peaked caps—­I suppose all her officers.  There are ships I have met more than once and known well by sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I have not forgotten.  How could I—­the first English ship on whose side I ever laid my hand!  The name—­I read it letter by letter on the bow—­was “James Westoll.”  Not very romantic you will say.  The name of a very considerable, well-known and universally respected North-country shipowner, I believe.  James Westoll!  What better name could an honourable hard-working ship have?  To me the very grouping of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her floating motionless, and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere purity of the light.

We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on board while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us all through the night, went on gliding gently past the black glistening length of the ship.  A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English—­the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—­of my very dreams!  And if (after being thus fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not claim it aloud as my own, then, at any rate the speech of my children.  Thus small events grow memorable by the passage of time.  As to the quality of the address itself I cannot say it was very striking.  Too short for eloquence and devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the three words “Look out there,” growled out huskily above my head.

It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy double chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up very high, even to the level of his breast-bone, by a pair of braces quite exposed to public view.  As where he stood there was no bulwark but only a rail and stanchions I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his voluminous person from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat like an absurd flanged cone on his big head.  The grotesque and massive space of that deck hand (I suppose he was that—­very likely the lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much.  My course of reading, of dreaming and longing for