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remember a single word of that letter now.  It was my very first composition in the English language.  And he had understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers.  But he gathered that this was not my object.  I did not desire to be apprenticed.  Was that the case?
    It was.  He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a gentleman.  But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible.  Is that it?”
    It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this.  There was an Act of Parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors.  “An Act-of-Parliament.  A law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.
    I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament!  What a hopeless adventure!  However, the barocco apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit.  Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen; and in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine.  For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me.  For many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling.  It isn’t such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament.  And I am glad to say that its seventies have never been applied to me.
    In the year 1878, the year of “Peace with Honour,” I had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care.  And now, in the year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendships secured.  It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle.
    All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.
    I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound to take me away from daily life’s actualities at every step.  I felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship’s passengers.  That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name.  It had been for some time the schoolroom of my trade.  On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English.  A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow-water academy of seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide oceans.  My teachers had been the sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning.  Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all, as far as I can remember.
    That is what years ago the North Sea I could hear growling in the dark all round the ship had been for me.  And I fancied that I must have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition.
    I could not guess that before many days my old schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under its waters.  Perhaps while I am writing these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in trawlers, under the Naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.
     

III.
     
    I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of