other ship but the Apse Family, the Lucy was like a sort of magic craft that did what you wanted her to do of her own accord. One evening we got caught aback pretty sharply from right ahead. In about ten minutes we had her full again and going along easy, sheets aft,^* tacks down, decks cleared, and the officer of the watch leaning against the weather-rail peacefully. It seemed simply marvellous to me. The other, most likely, would have stuck in irons for half an hour, rolling her decks full, knocking the men about—spars cracking, braces snapping, yards^* taking charge, and a confounded scare going on aft about her beastly rudder, which she had a way of flapping about fit to raise your hair on end. I couldn’t get over my wonder for days.

‘Well, I finished my last year of apprenticeship in that jolly little ship (she wasn’t so little, either, but after that other heavy devil she seemed but a plaything to handle)—I finished my time and passed my exam for second mate; and then, just as I was thinking of having three weeks of good time on shore, I got at breakfast a letter from the firm asking me the earliest day I could be ready to join the Apse Family as third officer. I gave my plate a shove that shot it into the middle of the table. Dad looked up over his paper; mother raised her hands in astonishment; and I went out bareheaded into our bit of a garden, where I walked round and round for an hour.

‘When I came in, mother was out of the dining-room and dad had shifted berth into his big armchair by the fire. The letter was lying on the mantelpiece.

‘ “It’s very creditable to you and very kind of them,” he said. “And I see also that Charles has been appointed chief mate of that ship for one voyage.”

‘There was a PS overleaf in Mr Apse’s own handwriting which I had overlooked. Charley was my big brother.

‘ “I don’t like very much to have two of my boys in the same ship,” father goes on in his deliberate, solemn way; “and I may tell you that I would not mind writing Mr Apse a letter to that effect.”

‘Dear old chap! He was a wonderful father. What would you have done? The mere notion of going back (and as an officer, too) to be worried and bothered and kept on the jump night and day by that brute made me feel sick. But she wasn’t a ship you could afford to be shy of openly. Besides, the most genuine excuse could not be given without mortally offending Apse & Sons. The firm, and I believe the whole family down to the old unmarried sisters in Lancashire, had grown desperately touchy about that accursed ship’s character. This was a case for answering “Ready now” from your very deathbed if you wished to die in their good graces. And that’s precisely what I did answer—by wire.

‘The prospect of being with my big brother cheered me up considerably, though it made me a bit anxious, too. Ever since I remember myself as a little chap he had been very good to me, and I looked upon him as the finest fellow in the world. And so he was. No better officer ever walked the deck of a merchant- ship, and that’s a fact. He was a fine, strong, upstanding, sun-tanned young fellow, with his brown hair curling a little, and an eye like a hawk. He was just splendid. We hadn’t seen each other for many years, and even this time, though he had been in England three weeks already, he hadn’t showed up at home yet, but had spent his spare time in Surrey somewhere, making up to Maggie Colchester, old Captain Colchester’s niece. Her father, a great friend of my dad, was in the sugar-broking business, and Charley made a sort of second home of their house. I wondered what my big brother would think of me. There was a sort of sternness about Charley’s face which never left it, not even when he was larking in his rather wild fashion.

‘He received me with a great shout of laughter. He seemed to think my joining as an officer the funniest thing in the world. There were eleven years between our ages, and I suppose he remembered me best in pinafores.^* I was just four when he first went to sea. It surprised me to find how boisterous he could be.