"My name is URSUS, and this is my staff DREADNOUGHT:  let the people in the Valley be afraid!"

Whereat the other cut himself a yet huger staff, and cried out in a yet louder voice:

"My name is TAURUS, and this is my staff CRACK-SKULL:  let them tremble who live in the Dales!"

And when they had said this they strode shouting down the mountain-side and conquered the town of Elizondo, where they are worshipped as gods to this day.  Their names?  They gave themselves a hundred names!

"Well, well,” you say to me then, “no matter about the names:  what are names?  The men themselves concern me!...  Tell me,” you go on, “tell me where I am to find them in the flesh, and converse with them.  I am in haste to see them with my own eyes."

It is useless to ask.  They are dead.  They will never again be heard upon the heaths at morning singing their happy songs:  they will never more drink with their peers in the deep ingle-nooks of home.  They are perished.  They have disappeared.  Alas!  The valiant fellows!

But lest some list of their proud deeds and notable excursions should be lost on earth, and turn perhaps into legend, or what is worse, fade away unrecorded, this book has been got together; in which will be found now a sight they saw together, and now a sight one saw by himself, and now a sight seen only by the other.  As also certain thoughts and admirations which the second or the first enjoyed, or both together:  and indeed many other towns, seas, places, mountains, rivers, and men—­whatever could be crammed between the covers.

And there is an end of it.

* * * * *

Many of these pages have appeared in the “Speaker,” the “Pilot,” the “Morning Post,” the “Daily News.” the “Pall Mall Magazine,” the “Evening Standard,” the “Morning Leader,” and the “Westminster Gazette.”

* * * * *

THE NORTH SEA

It was on or about a Tuesday (I speak without boasting) that my companion and I crept in by darkness to the unpleasant harbour of Lowestoft.  And I say “unpleasant” because, however charming for the large Colonial yacht, it is the very devil for the little English craft that tries to lie there.  Great boats are moored in the Southern Basin, each with two head ropes to a buoy, so that the front of them makes a kind of entanglement such as is used to defend the front of a position in warfare.  Through this entanglement you are told to creep as best you can, and if you cannot (who could?) a man comes off in a boat and moors you, not head and stern, but, as it were, criss-cross, or slant-ways, so that you are really foul of the next berth alongside, and that in our case was a little steamer.

Then when you protest that there may be a collision at midnight, the man in the boat says merrily, “Oh, the wind will keep you off,” as though winds never changed or dropped.