Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/111

Rh Back—unless you've managed to hang on to the editorial chair of the Boomerang. I think of old Come-by-Chance sometimes; I suppose things are just as dull as ever in that dead-and-alive township.

I'll tell you all about the voyage some other time. We had fog, thick, heavy and wet as one of old "Curry-and- Rice's" dampers, from Spain, past Plymouth, and nearly to Dover. Syren going the whole time, and other syrens all round through the night. All the officers on the bridge and the lookout men for'ard. "Light on the port bow, sir!" "Light on the starboard bow, sir!" "Vessel on the port bow, sir!" all the time. Somewhere coming out of the Bay of Biscay we just shaved a big four-masted sailing ship that suddenly developed out of a smudge in the fog. That's nothing in these waters. The ship's people kept winding up mud and seaweed from the bottom to see where we were—prospecting the bottom of the Channel. It wasn't what we'd call "payable dirt" on the goldfields; this submarine prospecting delayed us considerably, but it probably saved our lives. We saw Dover on a fine, bright morning. You remember a picture in a glass case at home, half picture, half modelled, with a cliff like a piece of scraped chalk painted a bright green on top, and little Noah's ark houses with dabs of colour for windows and doors, and trees—like those in a cheap box of toys—stuck about the top of the cliff. Cliff too white, we thought, and trees and grass altogether too green for anything of the kind on earth—outside a picture. Well, Dover from the distance