scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a few kittiwakes
appeared. A week later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like
beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the hill. They vanished,
and we pretended not to miss them. When our hands grew chill with
steering we rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our
pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell.
We take one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and
tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through which, in a
week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the Baltic merchantmen,
our November visitors--bluff vessels with red-painted channels, green
deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits overhanging astern, and the
Danish flag fluttering aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with
us, as with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long
delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dissembled too long;
and know, as we go through the form of debating it, that our date must be
the next spring-tides.

This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding farewell to
summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in ceremonial silence.
_Favete linguis!_ The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at this season
reach their height a little after night-fall, and it is on an already
slackening flood that we cast off our moorings and head up the river with
our backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are
ourselves towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession.
She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, and
all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside the town quay and
beneath the shears--the abhorred shears--which lift this too out of its
step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry of Polydorus.
We lower it, lay it along the deck, and resume our way; past quay doors
and windows where already the townsfolk are beginning to light their
lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on
bulwarks and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all
but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like the
Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own; and they never
saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as
samite--those heavenly wings!--nor felt her gallant spirit straining to
beat her own record be