s day. Their names? They gave themselves a
hundred names!_

_"Well, well," you say to me then, "no matter about the names: what are
names? The men themselves concern me!... Tell me," you go on, "tell me
where I am to find them in the flesh, and converse with them. I am in
haste to see them with my own eyes."_

_It is useless to ask. They are dead. They will never again be heard
upon the heaths at morning singing their happy songs: they will never
more drink with their peers in the deep ingle-nooks of home. They are
perished. They have disappeared. Alas! The valiant fellows!_

_But lest some list of their proud deeds and notable excursions should
be lost on earth, and turn perhaps into legend, or what is worse, fade
away unrecorded, this book has been got together; in which will be found
now a sight they saw together, and now a sight one saw by himself, and
now a sight seen only by the other. As also certain thoughts and
admirations which the second or the first enjoyed, or both together: and
indeed many other towns, seas, places, mountains, rivers, and
men--whatever could be crammed between the covers._

_And there is an end of it._

* * * * *

Many of these pages have appeared in the "Speaker,"
the "Pilot," the "Morning Post," the "Daily News."
the "Pall Mall Magazine," the "Evening Standard,"
the "Morning Leader," and the "Westminster Gazette."

* * * * *

THE NORTH SEA

It was on or about a Tuesday (I speak without boasting) that my
companion and I crept in by darkness to the unpleasant harbour of
Lowestoft. And I say "unpleasant" because, however charming for the
large Colonial yacht, it is the very devil for the little English craft
that tries to lie there. Great boats are moored in the Southern Basin,
each with two head ropes to a buoy, so that the front of them makes a
kind of entanglement such as is used to defend the front of a position
in warfare. Through this entanglement you are told to creep as best you
can, and if you cannot (who could?) a man comes off in a boat and moors
you, not head and stern, but, as it were, criss-cross, or slant-ways, so
that you are really foul of the next berth alongside, and that in our
case was a little steamer.

Then when you protest that there may be a collision at midnight, the man
in the boat says merrily, "Oh, the wind will keep you off," as though
winds never changed or d