At another time they took a rotten old leaky boat they were poor and could afford no other—­they took, I say, a rotten old leaky boat whose tiller was loose and whose sails mouldy, and whose blocks were jammed and creaking, and whose rigging frayed, and they boldly set out together into the great North Sea.

It blew a capful, it blew half a gale, it blew a gale:  little they cared, these sons of Ares, these cousins of the broad daylight!  There mere no men on earth save these two who would not have got her under a trysail and a rag of a storm-jib with fifteen reefs and another:  not so the heroes.  Not a stitch would they take in.  They carried all her canvas, and cried out to the north-east wind:  “We know her better than you!  She’ll carry away before she capsizes, and she’ll burst long before she’ll carry away.”  So they ran before it largely till the bows were pressed right under, and it was no human poser that saved the gybe.  They went tearing and foaming before it, singing a Saga as befitted the place and time.  For it was their habit to sing in every place its proper song—­in Italy a Ritornella, in Spain a Segeduilla, in Provence a Pastourou, in Sussex a Glee, but an the great North Sea a Saga.  And they rolled at last into Orford Haven on the very tiptop of the highest tide that ever has run since the Noachic Deluge; and even so, as they crossed the bar they heard the grating of the keel.  That night they sacrificed oysters to Poseidon.

And when they slept the Sea Lady, the silver-footed one, came up through the waves and kissed them in their sleep; for she had seen no such men since Achilles.  Then she went back through the waves with all her Nereids around her to where her throne is, beside her old father in the depths of the sea.

In their errantry they did great good.  It was they that rescued Andromeda, though she lied, as a woman will, and gave the praise to her lover.  It was they, also, who slew the Tarasque on his second appearance, when he came in a thunderstorm across the broad bridge of Beaucaire, all scaled in crimson and gold, forty foot long and twenty foot high, galloping like an angry dog and belching forth flames and smoke.  They also hunted down the Bactrian Bear, who had claws like the horns of a cow, and of whom it is written in the Sacred Books of the East that:

     A Bear out of Bactria came,
       And he wandered all over the world,
     And his eyes were aglint and aflame,
       And the tip of his caudal was curled.

Oh! they hunted him down and they cut him up, and they cured one of his hams and ate it, thereby acquiring something of his mighty spirit....  And they it was who caught the great Devil of Dax and tied him up and swinged him with an ash-plant till he swore that he would haunt the woods no more.

And here it is that you ask me for their names.  Their names!  Their names?  Why, they gave themselves a hundred names:  now this, now that, but always names of power.  Thus upon that great march of theirs from Gascony into Navarre, one, on the crest of the mountains, cut himself a huge staff and cried loudly: