“German I should think,” muttered one.  “The skipper has his wife on board,” remarked another; and the light of the crimson sunset all ablaze behind the London smoke, throwing a glow of Bengal light upon the barque’s spars, faded away from the Hope Reach.

Then one of us, who had not spoken before, a man of over fifty, that had commanded ships for a quarter of a century, looking after the barque now gliding far away, all black on the lustre of the river, said: 

This reminds me of an absurd episode in my life, now many years ago, when I got first the command of an iron barque, loading then in a certain Eastern seaport.  It was also the capital of an Eastern kingdom, lying up a river as might be London lies up this old Thames of ours.  No more need be said of the place; for this sort of thing might have happened anywhere where there are ships, skippers, tugboats, and orphan nieces of indescribable splendour.  And the absurdity of the episode concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann.

There seemed to be something like peculiar emphasis on the words “My friend Hermann,” which caused one of us (for we had just been speaking of heroism at sea) to say idly and nonchalantly: 

“And was this Hermann a hero?”

Not at all, said our grizzled friend.  No hero at all.  He was a Schiff-fuhrer:  Ship-conductor.  That’s how they call a Master Mariner in Germany.  I prefer our way.  The alliteration is good, and there is something in the nomenclature that gives to us as a body the sense of corporate existence:  Apprentice, Mate, Master, in the ancient and honourable craft of the sea.  As to my friend Hermann, he might have been a consummate master of the honourable craft, but he was called officially Schiff-fuhrer, and had the simple, heavy appearance of a well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of a small shopkeeper.  With his shaven chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of the sea.  Still, he toiled upon the seas, in his own way, much as a shopkeeper works behind his counter.  And his ship was the means by which he maintained his growing family.

She was a heavy, strong, blunt-bowed affair, awakening the ideas of primitive solidity, like the wooden plough of our forefathers.  And there were, about her, other suggestions of a rustic and homely nature.  The extraordinary timber projections which I have seen in no other vessel made her square stern resemble the tail end of a miller’s waggon.  But the four stern ports of her cabin, glazed with six little greenish panes each, and framed in wooden sashes painted brown, might have been the windows of a cottage in the country.  The tiny white curtains and the greenery of flower pots behind the glass completed the resemblance.  On one or two occasions when passing under stern I had detected from my boat a round arm in the act of tilting a watering pot, and the bowed sleek head of a maiden whom I shall always call Hermann’s niece, because as a matter of fact I’ve never heard her name, for all my intimacy with the family.