The gentlemen who vary my slumbers by howling “The Rollicking Rams” in eight different keys at four in the morning would call the ship’s company of that schooner soft.  There are opinions and opinions.  At any rate the hours passed softly away until the yacht ran clean into the thick of the fleet, and the merry, eldritch exchange of salutes began.

The second breeze had been worse than the first, and many men had gone; but the smacksmen, by a special mercy, have no time for morbid brooding.  They will risk their lives with the most incredible dauntlessness to save a comrade.  The Albert Medal is, I make bold to say, deserved by a score of men in the North Sea every year.  The fellows will talk with grave pity about Jim or Jack, who were lost twenty years ago; they remember all his ways, his last words, his very relatives; but, when a breeze is over, they make no moan over the lost ones until they gather in prayer-meetings.

“Watch now, and you’ll soon see something,” said Blair to Ferrier.

The boats began to flit round on the quiet sea, and the lines of them converged towards the schooner or towards a certain smart smack, which Fullerton eyed with a queer sort of paternal and proprietary interest.  The men knew that the yacht was free to them as a dispensary, and the care they took to avoid doing unnecessary damage was touching.  When you are wearing a pair of boots weighing jointly about three stone, you cannot tread like a fairy.  Blair knew this, and, though his boat was scrupulously clean, he did not care for the lady’s boudoir and oak floor business.

Lewis had his hands full—­so full that the ladies went below.  The great scholar’s mind was almost paralyzed by the phenomena before him.  Could it be possible that, in wealthy, Christian England there ever was a time when no man knew or cared about this saddening condition of affairs?  The light failed soon, and the boats durst not hang about after the fleet began to sail; but, until the last minute, one long, slow, drizzle of misery seemed to fall like a dreary litany on the surgeon’s nerves.  The smashed fingers alone were painful to see, but there were other accidents much worse.  Every man in the fleet had been compelled to fight desperately for life, and you cannot go through such a battle without risks.  There were no malingerers; the bald, brutal facts of crushed bones, or flayed scalp, or broken leg, or poisoned hand were there in evidence, and the men used no extra words after they had modestly described the time and circumstances under which they met with their trouble.  Ferrier worked as long as he could, and then joined the others at tea—­that most pleasant of all meetings on the sombre North Sea.  The young man was glum in face, and he could not shake off his abstraction.  At last he burst out, in answer to Fullerton, “I feel like a criminal.  I haven’t seen fifty per cent of the men who came, and I’ve sent back at least half a dozen who have no more right to be working