where the streets are quite narrow and Moorish, a woman and six or seven men had spoken Catalan to me for nearly one hour:  it was in a cellar surrounded by great barrels, and I remember it well.  So, also, on the River Noguera, coming up again into the hills, a girl who took the toll at the wooden bridge had spoken Catalan to me.  But none of these had I ever answered so that they could understand, and on this account I was very grieved to hear the Catalan tongue, though I remembered that if I spoke to them with ordinary Spanish words or in French with a strong Southern accent they would usually have some idea of what I was saying.

As the evening fell the cables were slipped without songs, and with great dignity, rapidity, and order the ship was got away.

I knew a man once, a seafaring man, a Scotchman, with whom I travelled on a very slow old boat in the Atlantic, who told me that the Northern people of Europe were bravest in a unexpected danger, but the Southern in a danger long foreseen.  He said he had known many of both kinds, and had served under them and commanded them.  He said that in sudden accident the Northerner was the more reliable man, but that if an act of great danger had to be planned and coolly achieved, then the Southerner was strongest in doing what he had to do.  He said that in taking the ground he would rather have a Northern, but in bringing in a short ship a Southern crew.

He was a man who observed closely, and never said a thing because he had read it.  Indeed, he did not read, and he had in a little hanging shelf above his bunk only four or five tattered books, and even these were magazines.  I remembered his testimony now as I watched these Catalans letting the ship go free, and I believed it, comparing it with history and the things I had myself seen.  They did everything with such regularity and so silently that it was a different deck from what one would have had in the heave of the Channel.  With Normans or Bretons, or Cornishmen or men of Kent, but especially with men from London river, there would have been all sorts of cursing and bellowing, and they could not have touched a rope without throwing themselves into attitudes of violence.  But these men took the sea quite quietly, nor could you tell from their faces which was rich and which was poor.

It was not till the ship was out throbbing swiftly Over the smooth sea and darkness had fallen that they began to sing.  Then those of them who were not working gathered together with a stringed instrument forward and sang of pity and of death.  One of them said to me, “Knight, can your grace sing?” I told him that I could sing, certainly, but that my singing was unpleasing, and that I only knew foreign songs.  He said that singing was a great solace, and desired to hear a song of my own country.  So I sang them a song out of Sussex, to which they listened in deep silence, and when it was concluded their leader snapped and twanged at the strings again and began another song about the riding of horses in the hills.