on't you bother,' he answered. 'I expect you're tired. Aren't
we having a splendid sail? That must be Ekken on the port bow,'
peering under the sail, 'where the trees run in. I say, do you mind
looking at the chart?' He tossed it over to me. I spread it out
painfully, for it curled up like a watch-spring at the least
slackening of pressure. I was not familiar with charts, and this
sudden trust reposed in me, after a good deal of neglect, made me
nervous.

'You see Flensburg, don't you?' he said. 'That's where we are,'
dabbing with a long reach at an indefinite space on the crowded
sheet. 'Now which side of that buoy off the point do we pass?'

I had scarcely taken in which was land and which was water, much less
the significance of the buoy, when he resumed:

'Never mind; I'm pretty sure it's all deep water about here. I expect
that marks the fair-way for steamers.

In a minute or two we were passing the buoy in question, on the wrong
side I am pretty certain, for weeds and sand came suddenly into view
below us with uncomfortable distinctness. But all Davies said was:

'There's never any sea here, and the plate's not down,' a dark
utterance which I pondered doubtfully. 'The best of these Schleswig
waters,' he went on, is that a boat of this size can go almost
anywhere. There's no navigation required. Why--'At this moment a
faint scraping was felt, rather than heard, beneath us.

'Aren't we aground?' I asked with great calmness.

'Oh, she'll blow over,' he replied, wincing a little.

She 'blew over', but the episode caused a little naive vexation in
Davies. I relate it as a good instance of one of his minor
peculiarities. He was utterly without that didactic pedantry which
yachting has a fatal tendency to engender In men who profess it. He
had tossed me the chart without a thought that I was an ignoramus, to
whom it would be Greek, and who would provide him with an admirable
subject to drill and lecture, just as his neglect of me throughout
the morning had been merely habitual and unconscious independence. In
the second place, master of his _metier_, as I knew him afterwards to
be, resourceful, skilful, and alert, he was liable to lapse into a
certain amateurish vagueness, half irritating and half amusing. I
think truly that both these peculiarities came from the same source,
a hatred of any sort of affectation. To the same source I traced the
fact that he and his yacht observed none of the superficial etiquette