seem to say invitingly, "Come and bathe!"
The handsome liill tar off makes a graceful
boundary for ihe bay (and our bay is said to be
a trifle finer than a certain Bay of Naples), and
behind are the snowy chalk-looking lines of
houses laid in bands on the hills, and glistening
like everything else. There are the low-
lying yacht-club houses on the right and left
hands, and there is the pier, which stretches
out like a long finger, and up to which the great
mail steamers come gliding. With such a setting,
and on such a day, our yacht looks
respectable indeed, and, so to speak, holds her
own. She is not ambitious, being about two
and thirty tons burden, and musters a crew of
tour men, including "a skipper," of whom a
word more by-and-by. But speaking with a
professional air of skilfulness, let us say that
she is a very "handy" size, and has more conveniences
and fewer responsibilities than greater
craft.

Her decks are as bright and polished as if they
were a vast expanse of churn spread out fresh
from the most scrupulously kept dairy, and the
sail flaps lazily as if it were our yacht's white
coat put on in a tropical climate and languidly
worn. Her mast glistens in the sun, and looks
like a great stick of sugar-barley. Her hull outside
is of a close brown chocolate; and her linen,
fore and aft, is smooth and spotless. Below,
everything is "snug"—a little square chamber
like a room in a travelling van, with tiny bedrooms
off it, and a tinier kitchen beyond, out of
which our cook emerges mysteriously, and always
in a bent attitude—a position which we have all
learnt to acquire by a sort of instinct, and a
rueful experience purchased at the sacrifice of
crushed and flattened head-gear.

It is a moment of justifiable pride when we go
down the steps of the pier to where our boat
lies, and when our own men, with the name
of our own yacht, "QUEEN MAY," inscribed
in sampler-like letters on their broad chests,
are waiting obsequiously. They are our nautical
serfs. They reverently take in our cloaks and
wraps, and with yet more reverence our ladies;
they drop their oars with a professional plash,
and pull away with a will. Then comes the
getting aboard. Then we go "hauling on our
main-sheet," get up our anchor, and one of the
pleasantest moments of the whole is when our
yacht, after a flap or two to give herself courage,
lets herself fall back gracefully into the arms of
the wind, and goes off (I hope this is professional)
as a young lady would do in a valse.
That moment when "her head" comes round
and we all "heel over," is also one of the most
agreeable. The ladies bivouack about the deck
with parasols up and dresses fluttering, dipping
their heads by trained instinct, as a matter of
course, to avoid the "boom," when the clatter
and flapping and patter of feet which make up
the operation known as that of "going about"
set in.

Getting clear of the harbour, and catching
the full fresh gush of breeze and open sea, our
sail fills out like a shell. Our skipper is at the
stern: a wonderfully compact, compressed, and
Dutch-looking mariner, who, when appealed to
about the weather, as he often is, or about the
ownership of a passing yacht, or about the distance
of the Channel Islands, or about the, tide,
deliberately consults the sky, then the sea and
horizon, and finally the deck of his own vessel,
before he will trust himself to reply. Nautical
strangers take this slowness to be born of
physical infirmity, and repeat these questions
testily; but the initiated know him better,
and give him time to go through this
process.

As a rule, the ladies are far better sailors than
men. When our yacht gets out of the breeze
and begins to swing up and down, like a restive
horse under the curb, I notice that gentlemen
grow a little pensive, if not silent, looking
gloomily up and down the deck; but the spirit
of our ladies is excellent, and they long for the
breeze that shall blow their hair from under
their hats,. By-and-by it does come; then the
QUEEN MAY swings herself over with a
sudden lurch, and sweeps through the water
stiffly.

Presently the banquet is spread below, on
a balanced table, when a heavy blue mariner
comes in from the mysterious kitchen, carrying
hot potatoes. On that signal, locker-boxes,
pigeon-holes, all open, and, being rifled, give up
their dead. The good fairies of our yacht touch
this and that spring, and forth come wine and
salad, and well-embrowned poultry, like the
viands in a pantomime feast. The champagne
fitly comes up out of the wooden ground,
thus happily carrying out the position of
a cellar; the mustard lies down peacefully
with the bread; the salad-oil sleeps side by
side with the cigar. Yet all such elements
are refractory and embarrassing, and have, to be
watched like schoolboys. When our yacht grows
frantic and seems to be in liquor—reeling from
side to side, staggering, all but falling on her
face, a shocking and indecent spectacle—her
cabin becomes a great churn, and everything
not fixed, is flung about and dashed into chaos.
Once, even our select library—whose place of
honour is always over the little shelf known as
a berth—under the violence of the gale burst its
fastenings, and Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Buckle's
Civilisation, Maunder's Treasury, and Miss
Berry's Diary and Correspondence—all stout
and portly volumes of their kind—came down
incontinently, and buried the sleeper in a heap
of biblical ruins.

The great festival for our bay, and indirectly
for our yacht, is, when a regatta comes round.
We do not enter her for Cups, not having much
confidence in her powers in that direction,
though our skipper, after previously consulting
sky and sea and the lines of his deck, has
hinted oracularly, that from private information
he "know'd" she could do it, if she were "put
to it." Yet though this seems a just encouragement,
we have never ventured to "put her to
it;" and we have always given as the reason—
not wishing to put our protégée to shame—that