you’re working above him—­same as if ’twas fish.”  I should not care to be hunted for the life in shallow waters by a man who knows every bank and pothole of them, even if I had not killed his friends the week before.  Being nearly all fishermen they discuss their work in terms of fish, and put in their leisure fishing overside, when they sometimes pull up ghastly souvenirs.  But they all want guns.  Those who have three-pounders clamour for sixes; sixes for twelves; and the twelve-pound aristocracy dream of four-inchers on anti-aircraft mountings for the benefit of roving Zeppelins.  They will all get them in time, and I fancy it will be long ere they give them up.  One West Country mate announced that “a gun is a handy thing to have aboard—­always.”  “But in peacetime?” I said.  “Wouldn’t it be in the way?”

“We’m used to ’em now,” was the smiling answer.  “Niver go to sea again without a gun—­I wouldn’t—­if I had my way.  It keeps all hands pleased-like.”

They talk about men in the Army who will never willingly go back to civil life.  What of the fishermen who have tasted something sharper than salt water—­and what of the young third and fourth mates who have held independent commands for nine months past?  One of them said to me quite irrelevantly:  “I used to be the animal that got up the trunks for the women on baggage-days in the old Bodiam Castle,” and he mimicked their requests for “the large brown box,” or “the black dress basket,” as a freed soul might scoff at his old life in the flesh.

“A common sweeper”

My sponsor and chaperon in this Elizabethan world of eighteenth-century seamen was an A.B. who had gone down in the Landrail, assisted at the Heligoland fight, seen the Bluecher sink and the bombs dropped on our boats when we tried to save the drowning ("Whereby,” as he said, “those Germans died gottstrafin’ their own country because we didn’t wait to be strafed"), and has now found more peaceful days in an Office ashore.  He led me across many decks from craft to craft to study the various appliances that they specialise in.  Almost our last was what a North Country trawler called a “common sweeper,” that is to say, a mine-sweeper.  She was at tea in her shirt-sleeves, and she protested loudly that there was “nothing in sweeping.” “’See that wire rope?” she said.  “Well, it leads through that lead to the ship which you’re sweepin’ with.  She makes her end fast and you make yourn.  Then you sweep together at whichever depth you’ve agreed upon between you, by means of that arrangement there which regulates the depth.  They give you a glass sort o’ thing for keepin’ your distance from the other ship, but that’s not wanted if you know each other.  Well, then, you sweep, as the sayin’ is.  There’s nothin’ in it.  You sweep till this wire rope fouls the bloomin’ mines.  Then you go on till they appear on the surface, so to say, and then you explodes them by means of shootin’ at ’em with that rifle in the galley there.  There’s nothin’ in sweepin’ more than that.”