t ahead of the _Cairnbulg_.

The effect of that casual recollection on the submarine officer was
distinctly unwarlike. This memory, and not his present work, might
have been the real thing. He knew Woodget, the man in the Glengarry.
He wanted to know more; ever so much more. He mentioned other ships
and masters, to induce me. I got the idea that he would let his mind,
at least, escape into that time, if only I would help him to let it go.
But there was that potent and silent enigma about us. . . .

No such escape for him. We have fashioned other ships, and must use
them. What we have conjured up compels us to live with it. But when
you do not go to sea you may have what ships you like. There is some
but not much interest in the reappearance in the newspapers of the
sailing lists; a few of the old names appear again, though new ships
bear them. But late at night, when a westerly wind with rain turns for
me a neighbouring yew tree into an invisible surge, then it is the
fortune of one who remembers such as the _Cutty Sark_ to choose
different ships and other times. Why not choose them? They were
comely ships, and now their time seems fair. Who would care to
remember the power and grey threat of a modern warship, or the exotic
luxury of a liner of this new era? Nobody who remembers the
graciousness of the clippers, nor the pride and content of the seamen
who worked them. To aid the illusion of the yew, I have one of those
books which are not books, a _Lloyd's Register of Shipping_ for 1880,
that by some unknown circuitous route found its way from its first
owner in Madras to my suburb. It goes very well with the surge of yew,
when westerly weather comes to unite them.

I should like to know how that book got to London. Somewhere in it is
the name of the ship which carried it. Anyhow, I think I can make out
in it the houseflag of that ship. It, was, I believe, one of J. H.
Allan's teak-built craft, a forgotten line--the _Rajah of Cochin_, the
_Copenhagen_, the _Lincelles_,--though only just before the War, in the
South-West India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman looking for work, who
regretted its disappearance, and the new company-owned steamers; for he
said they were good ships, "but more than that," he told me, "Allan was
an old gentleman who knew his own ships, and knew his men." This
stranger said you forget a ship now as soon as you are paid off, "and
glad to," and "you don't ever know who owns he