While still our ship was under way, boats put out from the surrounding trawlers, and converged on us for our outward cargo, the empty fish-trunks.  That intense band of light which had first betrayed the smoke of the fleet eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of nimbus till the gloom was dissolved to the zenith.  The incubus vanished; the sun flooded us.  At last only white feathers were left in the sky.  I felt I had known and loved these trawlers for years.  All round us were ships’ boats, riding those sweeping seas in a gyrating and delirious lunacy; and in each were two jovial fishermen, who shouted separate reasons to our skipper for “the week off” he had taken.

These boats came at us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill on us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity of glass.  A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the snowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the Windhover canted away.  Then we rolled towards her, and there she was below us, in a smooth and transient hollow.  Watching for their chances, snatched out of luck by skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; the boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away, and then were swept off.  The shouted jokes were broadened and strengthened to fit that riot and uproar.  This sudden robust life, following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the creative word had been spoken only five minutes before.  We, and all this, had just come.  I wanted to laugh and cheer.

8

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a chart than from any impeccable modern map.  Maps today are losing their attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy.  Maps do not allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to tax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests.  But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world beneath the fathoms—­the Silver Pits, the Dowsing Ground, the Leman Bank, the Great Fisher Ground, the Horn Reef, the Witch Ground, and the Great Dogger Bank!  Strange, that indefinable implication of a word!  I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening to a grandfather’s clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and