First and Last | Page 2

and by, or freer still, right past the walls until you are well
into the tide outside. You may tell me that you are so rich and your boat
is so big that there have been times when you have anchored in the very
open, and that all this does not apply to you. Why, then, your thoughts
do not apply to me nor to the little boat I have in mind.
In the weighing of anchor and the taking of adventure and of the sea
there is an exact parallel to anything that any man can do in the
beginning of any human thing, from his momentous setting out upon
his life in early manhood to the least decision of his present passing day.
It is a very proper emblem of a beginning. It may lead him to that kind
of muddle and set-back which attaches only to beginnings, or it may
get him fairly into the weather, and yet he may find, a little way outside,
that he has to run for it, or to beat back to harbour. Or, more generously,
it may lead him to a long and steady cruise in which he shall find profit
and make distant rivers and continue to increase his log by one good
landfall after another. But the whole point of weighing anchor is that he
has chosen his weather and his tide, and that he is setting out. The thing
is done.
You will very commonly observe that, in land affairs, if good fortune
follows a venture it is due to the marvellous excellence of its conductor,

but if ill fortune, then to evil chance alone. Now, it is not so with the
sea.
The sea drives truth into a man like salt. A coward cannot long pretend
to be brave at sea, nor a fool to be wise, nor a prig to be a good
companion, and any venture connected with the sea is full of venture
and can pretend to be nothing more. Nevertheless there is a certain
pride in keeping a course through different weathers, in making the best
of a tide, in using cats' paws in a dull race, and, generally, in knowing
how to handle the thing you steer and to judge the water and the wind.
Just because men have to tell the truth once they get into tide water,
what little is due to themselves in their success thereon they are proud
of and acknowledge.
If your sailing venture goes well, sailing reader, take a just pride in it;
there will be the less need for me to write, some few years hence, upon
the art of picking up moorings, though I confess I would rather have
written on that so far as the fun of writing was concerned. For picking
up moorings is a far more tricky and amusing business than Getting It
up. It differs with every conceivable circumstance of wind, and tide,
and harbour, and rig, and freeboard, and light; and then there are so
many stories to tell about it! As--how once a poor man picked up a rich
man's moorings at Cowes and was visited by an aluminium boat, all
splendid in the morning sun. Or again--how a stranger who had made
Orford Haven (that very difficult place) on the very top of an
equinoctial springtide, picked up a racing mark-buoy, taking it to be
moorings, and dragged it with him all the way to Aldborough, and that
right before the town of Orford, so making himself hateful to the
Orford people.
But I digress....

The Reveillon
There was in the regiment with which I served a man called Frocot,
famous with his comrades because he had seen The Dead, for this
experience, though common among the Scotch, is rare among the
French, a sister nation. This man Frocot could neither write nor read,
and was also the strongest man I ever knew. He was quite short and
exceedingly broad, and he could break a penny with his hands, but this
gift of strength, though young men value it so much, was thought little

of compared with his perception of unseen things, for though the men,
who were peasants, professed to laugh at it, and him, in their hearts
they profoundly believed. It had been made clear to us that he could see
and hear The Dead one night in January during a snowstorm, when he
came in and woke me in barrack-room because he had heard the Loose
Spur. Our spurs were not buckled on like the officers'; they were fixed
into the heel of the boot, and if a nail loosened upon either side the spur
dragged with an unmistakable noise. There was a sergeant who (for
some reason) had one so loosened on the last