below us with uncomfortable distinctness. But all Davies said was:

'There's never any sea here, and the plate's not down,' a dark
utterance which I pondered doubtfully. 'The best of these Schleswig
waters,' he went on, is that a boat of this size can go almost
anywhere. There's no navigation required. Why--'At this moment a
faint scraping was felt, rather than heard, beneath us.

'Aren't we aground?' I asked. with great calmness.

'Oh, she'll blow over,' he replied, wincing a little.

She 'blew over', but the episode caused a little naive vexation in
Davies. I relate it as a good instance of one of his minor
peculiarities. He was utterly without that didactic pedantry which
yachting has a fatal tendency to engender In men who profess it. He
had tossed me the chart without a thought that I was an ignoramus, to
whom it would be Greek, and who would provide him with an admirable
subject to drill and lecture, just as his neglect of me throughout
the morning had been merely habitual and unconscious independence. In
the second place, master of his _métier_, as I knew him afterwards to
be, resourceful, skilful, and alert, he was liable to lapse into a
certain amateurish vagueness, half irritating and half amusing. I
think truly that both these peculiarities came from the same source,
a hatred of any sort of affectation. To the same source I traced the
fact that he and his yacht observed none of the superficial etiquette
of yachts and yachtsmen, that she never, for instance, flew a
national ensign, and he never wore a 'yachting suit'.

We rounded a low green point which I had scarcely noticed before.