Besides, why should a Londoner, and even an East-Ender whose familiar walls are topped by mastheads, believe in the nearness of the ocean?  We think of the shipping no more than we do of the paving stones or of the warnings of the pious.  It is an event of the first importance to go for a first voyage, though mine was to be only by steam-trawler to the Dogger Bank; yet, as the event had come to me so late, I had lost faith in the omens of London’s foreshore, among which, at the bottom of Mark Lane, was an Italian baking chestnuts over a coke fire.  The fog, and the slops, and the smell by Billingsgate, could have been tokens of no more than a twopenny journey to Shepherd’s Bush.  I had believed in the signs so little that I had left my bag at a railway station, miles away.

Three small steamers, the size of tugs, but with upstanding bows and a sheer suggesting speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish market, and mine, the Windhover, had the outside berth.  I climbed over to her.  Blubber littered her iron deck, and slime drained along her gutters.  Black grits showered from her stack.  The smell from her galley, and the heat from her engine-room casing, were challenging to a stranger.  It was no place for me.  The men and porters tramping about their jobs knew that, and did not order me out of their way.  This was Billingsgate, and there was a tide to be caught.  They hustled me out of it.  But the skipper had to be found, for I must know when I had to come aboard.  A perpendicular iron ladder led to her saloon from a hatch, and through unintelligence and the dark I entered that saloon more precipitously than was a measure of my eagerness, picked myself up with a coolness which I can only hope met with the approval of some silent men, watching me, who sat at a table there, and offered my pass to the man nearest me.

It was the mate.  He scrutinized the simple document at unnecessary length, and with a gravity that was embarrassing.  He turned up slowly a large and weather-beaten sadness, with a grizzled moustache that curled tightly into his mouth from under a long, thin nose which pointed at me like a finger.  His heavy eyes might have been melancholy or only tired, and they regarded me as if they sought on my face what they could not find on my document.  I thought he was searching me for the proof of my sanity.  Presently he spoke:  “Have you got to come?” he said, and in a gentle voice that was disconcerting from a figure so masculine.  While I was wondering what was hidden in this question, the ship’s master entered the saloon briskly.  He was plump and light.  His face was a smooth round of unctuous red, without a beard, and was mounted upon many folds of brown woollen scarf, like an attractive pudding on a platter.  He looked at me with amusement, as I have no doubt those lively eyes, with their brows of arched interest, looked at everything; and his thick grey hair was curved upwards in a confusion of interrogation marks.