JOSEPH CONRAD
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 schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under the waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in drifters under the naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.
III
I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know it in all its parts. My classroom was the region of the English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the shore. On many a night I have hauled at the braces under the very shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people ashore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not one head on these envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to bring to their peaceful shores.
Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day, and the aspects of nature don't change, unless in the course of thousands of years—or, perhaps, centuries. The Phœnicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light even on that July after-
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