We must be nearly there now – yes, there’s the entrance. Take the helm, will you?’

He sprang up the mast like a monkey, and gazed over the land from the cross-trees. I looked up at my enigma and thanked Providence I had not spoken; for no one could have resisted his frank outburst of good nature. Yet it occurred to me that, considering the conditions of our life, our intimacy was strangely slow in growth. I had no clue yet as to where his idiosyncrasies began and his self ended, and he, I surmised, was in the same stage towards me. Otherwise I should have pressed him further now, for I felt convinced that there was some mystery in his behaviour which I had not yet accounted for. However, light was soon to break.

I could see no sign of the entrance he had spoken of, and no wonder, for it is only eighty yards wide, though it leads to a fiord thirty miles long. All at once we were jolting in a tumble of sea, and the channel grudgingly disclosed itself, stealing between marshes and meadows and then broadening to a mere, as at Ekken. We anchored close to the mouth, and not far from a group of vessels of a type that afterwards grew very familiar to me. They were sailing-barges, something like those that ply in the Thames, bluff-bowed, high-sterned craft of about fifty tons, ketch-rigged and fitted with lee-boards, very light spars, and a long tip-tilted bowsprit. (For the future I shall call them ‘galliots.’) Otherwise the only sign of life was a solitary white house – the pilot’s house, the chart told us – close to the northern point of entrance. After tea we called on the pilot. Patriarchally installed before a roaring stove, in the company of a buxom bustling daughter-in-law and some rosy grandchildren, we found a rotund and rubicund person who greeted us with a hoarse roar of welcome in German, which instantly changed, when he saw us, to the funniest broken English, spoken with intense relish and pride. We explained ourselves and our mission as well as we could through the hospitable interruptions caused by beer and the strains of a huge musical-box, which had been set going in honour of our arrival. Needless to say, I was read like a book at once, and fell into the part of listener.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘all right. There is plenty ducks, but first we will drink a glass beer; then we will shift your ship, Captain – she lies not good there’ (Davies started up in a panic, but was waved back to his beer). ‘Then we will drink another glass beer; then we will talk of ducks – no, then we will kill ducks – that is better. Then we will have plenty glasses beer.’

This was an unexpected climax, and promised well for our prospects. And the programme was fully carried out. After the beer, our host was packed briskly by his daughter into an armour of woollen gaiters, coats, and mufflers, topped with a worsted helmet, which left nothing of his face visible but a pair of twinkling eyes. Thus equipped, he led the way out of doors, and roared for Hans and his gun till a great gawky youth, with high cheek-bones and a downy beard, came out from the yard and sheepishly shook our hands.

Together we repaired to the quay, where the pilot stood, looking like a genial ball of worsted, and bawled hoarse directions while we shifted the Dulcibella to a berth on the farther shore close to the other vessels. We returned with our guns, and the interval for refreshments followed. It was just dusk when we sallied out again, crossed a stretch of bog-land and took up strategic posts round a stagnant pond. Hans had been sent to drive, and the result was a fine mallard and three ducks. It was true that all fell to the pilot’s gun, perhaps owing to Hans’s filial instinct and his parent’s canny egotism in choosing his own lair, or perhaps it was chance; but the shooting-party was none the less a triumphal success. It was celebrated with beer and music as before, while the pilot, an infant on each podgy knee, discoursed exuberantly on the glories of his country and the Elysian content of his life.

‘There is plenty beer, plenty meat, plenty money, plenty ducks,’ summed up his survey.

It may have been fancy, but Davies, though he had fits and starts of vivacity, seemed very inattentive considering that we were sitting at the feet of so expansive an oracle. It was I who elicited most of the practical information: details of time, weather, and likely places for shooting, with some shrewd hints as to the kind of people to conciliate. Whatever he thought of me, I warmed with sympathy towards the pilot, for he assumed that we had done with cruising for the year, and thought us mad enough as it was to have been afloat so long, and madder still to intend living on ‘so little a ship’ when we could live on land with beer and music handy. I was tempted to raise the North Sea question just to watch Davies under the thunder of rebukes which would follow. But I refrained from a wish to be tender with him, now that all was going so well.