“It seems that the sails actually fluttered.  He couldn’t see them, but he heard them rattling and banging above his head.  ’No use!  She was too slow in going off,’ he went on, his dirty face twitching, and the damn’d carter’s whip shaking in his hand.  ‘She seemed to stick fast.’  And then the flutter of the canvas above his head ceased.  At this critical moment the wind hauled aft again with a gust, filling the sails and sending the ship with a great way upon the rocks on her lee bow.  She had overreached herself in her last little game.  Her time had come—­the hour, the man, the black night, the treacherous gust of wind—­the right woman to put an end to her.  The brute deserved nothing better.  Strange are the instruments of Providence.  There’s a sort of poetical justice—­”

The man in tweeds looked hard at me.

“The first ledge she went over stripped the false keel off her.  Rip!  The skipper, rushing out of his berth, found a crazy woman, in a red flannel dressing-gown, flying round and round the cuddy, screeching like a cockatoo.

“The next bump knocked her clean under the cabin table.  It also started the stern-post and carried away the rudder, and then that brute ran up a shelving, rocky shore, tearing her bottom out, till she stopped short, and the foremast dropped over the bows like a gangway.”

“Anybody lost?” I asked.

“No one, unless that fellow, Wilmot,” answered the gentleman, unknown to Miss Blank, looking round for his cap.  “And his case was worse than drowning for a man.  Everybody got ashore all right.  Gale didn’t come on till next day, dead from the West, and broke up that brute in a surprisingly short time.  It was as though she had been rotten at heart.” . . .  He changed his tone, “Rain left off?  I must get my bike and rush home to dinner.  I live in Herne Bay—­came out for a spin this morning.”

He nodded at me in a friendly way, and went out with a swagger.

“Do you know who he is, Jermyn?” I asked.

The North Sea pilot shook his head, dismally.  “Fancy losing a ship in that silly fashion!  Oh, dear! oh dear!” he groaned in lugubrious tones, spreading his damp handkerchief again like a curtain before the glowing grate.

On going out I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the respectable Miss Blank, barmaid of the Three Crows.

A DESPERATE TALE

AN ANARCHIST

That year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of the estates—­in fact, on the principal cattle estate—­of a famous meat-extract manufacturing company.