2 OCTOBER 1886, Page 20

A SEA-PAINTER'S LOG.* No happily-constituted person, gifted with the capacity

for real dawdling that is so rare, combined with the faculty of observa- tion, need desire a better companion for a leisurely holiday than Mr. Leslie's delightfully desultory, out-of-the-way, humorous book. It is tantalising reading in town, only that one may go on promising one's self to take particular note, when next one has a chance, of the beauties, the oddities, the effects that it points out. It has the immediate result of bringing the freshness of an "outdoor life spent chiefly among fishermen and sailors, or afloat in a boat," to one's imagination ; and even that is better than nothing. It is so good to be told what to look for, and how to see it, by an artist to whom the open air, the eea, the sky, and the fisher and sailor folk are all natural surroundings, and not a "fearful joy" snatched in the vague and hurried way in which the denizens of what Mr. Montague Tigg called "the Beehive " take their marine rnralities, because they never have

• A Sea-Painter's Log. By Robert C. Leslie. With Illustrations by the Author. London : Chapman and Hall.

time enough to get into the true dawdler's method. It would require the whole of an average holiday to learn how to bask in a boat, to sit on a sea-wall, to lie on the sand, or to lounge along a lane as if a week or so were of no consequence; and yet if one cannot do these things in the right way, one is only an amateur dawdler.

The real dawdler, it will be objected, would probably be too thoroughly consistent to care about diluting his own leisure by even so pleasant an exposition of the charms of somebody else's ; but it is at least well to apprise the fraternity of the existence of a valuable guide to the proper employment of their enviable faculty, and to those still in the aspirant condition of the amateur, this sea-painter will be an acquisition indeed. He is full of observation, and he never reveals an effort.

The most skittish objector to having useful knowledge imparted to him in holiday-time, would not shy from these pleasant, easily picturesque pages, with their clear racy style and their piquant variety. There is, however, a good deal of useful knowledge in Mr. Leslie's volume, and there is a whole gallery of pictures. One of these shows us the ice-ship Triton,' of Krageroe, in Norway, whose skipper says, when asked (in 1884) what sort of winter it has been with them, " Stormy, and plenty of snow at one time, but not at all a proper winter," and reports from the Western ocean an ice island two miles long by some 250 feet thick, "wandering about with no fixed course, and no lights upon it." A second shows us the heavily-built Chasse- Maree,' the ' Marie, Etoile de la Mer,' of Treguier, lying along- side the quay, on a bright morning, with her cargo of pota- toes, and it is a vivid sketch of both the still and the active life of the foreign craft that contrasts so strongly with the billy-boy Wideawake,' of Goole, as she lies all snug and tidy for Sunday, with a sedate, bard-looking woman sitting reading on the break of the little raised deck aft, while the sleepy notes of a psalm-tune come from an accordion somewhere down below. Between the Yorkshire billy-boy and the picturesque Dutch galliot, there is, the author tells us, a strong family like- ness. Both are built with a view to inland navigation, and their length and breadth are regulated by the size of certain canal locks. The billy-boys are now nearly the only clinker-built vessels of any size left, "the overlapping edges of their planks reminding us of the way the Viking ships were built, thus giving greatest amount of strength with least weight of material." Here is one of the latter, taken from a chapter headed "The Old Wherry ":—

" On the open seashore, A 1 for twelve years is not the lot of the fishing-boat. The tug of the capstan, and the grind of the beach, when she is run upon it, deep laden with nets, fish, or crab-pots, together with the bang of the athwart-shore seas, when each landing is more like a miniature shipwreck than an arrival at the desired haven, soon prove destructive, and such boats become nail-sick,' as sailors say, and leaky long before they are rotten. Pickled, as it were, by the continual wash of the salt sea-spray, years after sea life is over, you see them cut in halves serving as roofs for summer- houses or cabins, where the beachmen stow all that mysterious mass of lumber and confusion known to them as ' gear.' It is no longer a boat. Moss, with houseleek and grass, are growing on earth collected in the seams of the grey, weathered elm planks, cracked patches of old tar telling dark upon them. Like the veteran owners, such sea boats are condemned to spend a green, though not an entirely useless old age, ashore ; still pretty sound in plank and timbers, but not strong enough for the work. 'Not much the matter, thank God, only I wur born a little too soon,' is a favourite expression with their owners."

What a pleasant dawdle it would be to make acquaintance with the ferry at which the sea.painter's friend Peter works, and to observe his nice conduct of the ' Nil Desperandum,' formerly The Shah of Persia,' but renamed in consequence of her having unluckily capsized and drowned Peter's father and uncle, under the grander style. Ferrymen are now almost as rare as old hackney and stage coachmen, and a very typical ferryman Peter must be, ' living on year after year in the same old canvas trousers and faded jersey, never seeming to get wet, let it rain or blow ever so hard, yet so full of salt spray that there is always a charming seaweedy moisture about him on the hottest summer day." The " quality " seldom come by the way of Peter's ferry, and the "fares" who do the mile and a half voyage in his boat of immemorial age (for it was The Duke of York' before it became The Shah of Persia,' and it was not young in the ducal days), are mostly drovers, gipsies, pedlars, poachers, tramps, tinkers, sailors and soldiers and their companions, who bring with them the most various and incongruous articles imaginable. It is evident that Mr. Leslie has been a good customer to Peter, or he never could have given us so humorous

a description of the ferryman's method of beguiling the tedium of the voyage by a graphic account of the drowning of his relatives, and how, after the accident, " all as the best of glasses could discern was the butcher-boy and his tray, to which he stuck until such time as he were picked up." Peter upon the verdict of the coroner's jury on the melancholy occasion is very fine :—"And the crowner, he told the jury as sat upon 'em after the bodies was found, that their werdict must be accidental death and no one to blame, being the wisitation of Providence; which no doubt he were right enough there; but I says as how the wisitations of Providence is sometimes so wery perculiar, perticler in puffy weather, and takes wallable lives of igsperienced watermen like they was, while a butcher-boy saves hisself on his tray."

The chapters on " Mackerel-Fishing off Sidmouth," on " Drift- ing for Herring," on " Sprats and Spratting," with the curiously peaceful-looking drawings that illustrate these subjects, on "Yachts New and Old," on " Boat-Trawling for Amateurs," and "Boating as a Poor Man's Pastime," are full of interest, suggestion, and quaint, leisurely, pictorial effect ; but if we are to choose among the contents of a book from which we could not spare anything, we shall select for especial praise and repeated reading the author's delightful chapter on " Some Pleasures and Pastimes of Animals ;" his account of " A very common little dog " (sold as a " model marstiff," but more than worth the money as an imposition), with its introduction to Jim, " au old and not over-amiable tom-cat, and one that had hitherto led a dogless life ;" and lastly, the chapter on" Cormorants." He gives a curious description of those voracious birds, detested by the fisherman, of their wonderful powers of diving, and their extreme wariness. Owing to these marvellous gifts, Mr. Leslie holds that the cormorant (or " shag ") is not, nor ever will be, much dependent upon Acts of Parliament for his preservation. " Skippers of sailing barges," he says," and other small coasters nearly always carry a rusty musket or an old muzzleloader slung handy under their companion-way, and there are always plenty of idle gunners lounging about round the coast ; and you have only to ask one of these gentlemen how many shags he has killed during the last ten years, to get an idea of the cormorant's power of taking care of himself."