First and Last | Page 2

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 night he had ever gone the rounds before his death, for in the morning as he came off guard he killed himself, and the story went about among the drivers that sometimes on stable guard in the thick of the night, when you watched all alone by the lantern (with your three comrades asleep in the straw of an empty stall), your blood would stop and your skin tauten at the sound of a loose