le worming themselves into
their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was
pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I heard that the
sick man was better and had gone on deck.

The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with pink
and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to
add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash down the
decks. But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the steerage. I
found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward of the saloon
deck-house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but
his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey
from a distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and
grains of gold. His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain; and I
soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent and
language had been formed in the most natural way, since he was born in
Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the banks of the Tyne, and
was married to a Scots wife. A fisherman in the season, he had fished
the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, and
the great boats, which required extra hands, were once drawn up on shore
till the next spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces,
or along the wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way
of life he had gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable
house, his hayfield, and his garden. On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on a
pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.

Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the steerage
and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea
and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels. "_I'm_ not
afraid," he had told his adviser, "_I'll_ get on for ten days. I've not
been a fisherman for nothing." For it is no light matter, as he reminded
me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day
breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken,
iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage where you
dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.
The life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard
work and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
fisher por