“And I knew it was silly to keep on thinking with every step, ‘This brings you nearer the grammar-school--Portsannet--Portsannet and the grammar-school.’ Rousseau did it, you know. But once in a while, when you’ve laboured till your spirit seems freed from your body, it does seem all one--all part of something you’re trying to do, you don’t know what--something you’re trying to make of your life.... It was only seven miles; but seven miles or seven hundred isn’t the point. The point is just the limit of your endurance: if it’s only seven yards, seven hundred, or seven million, it comes to just that.... Wait a minute.... The moon was very little higher, so we couldn’t have been very long. I remember noticing this and shouting it out, but I don’t know whether it steadied them or not. My mind was somewhere in advance, over the Heights. I was thinking that, once over the top, the men who were pulling would fall back to check her; that without a pole the team would be useless; that a pole might be made of a long spar; that we might zigzag down; put props through the valve-holes; elementary mechanics, parallelogram of forces, grammar-school again, and a lot more light-witted stuff. Then somebody sighted the alum-works, a quarter of a mile to the left.... One minute....
“We were at the top. It’s forty-five years ago, and you can persuade yourself of a lot in less than that time. We persuaded ourselves afterwards that it was a moment of triumph--there was no harm in that; but we knew better really. We knew in our hearts that the Portsannet men would have to man the boat for themselves, for we reeled like drunkards, went forward like drunkards, with the drunkard’s instinct for his bed. But we boasted foolishly: we would put out ourselves--take her back that night--show what men could do,--I don’t know what. Nobody said it was nonsense. Joe Barker alone seemed to realise that it didn’t follow that because we’d got through, the _Lizzie Martin_ had. We could hear the sea now, a dull roar, and far on our right the Abbey light flashed white and red. There was a babel of talking. Men with horses seemed to join us every few minutes. A man called Lockwood came from Lizzie’s old home with two Galloways and a mare in foal, and they hitched them on behind. As they did so we stood for a moment looking down on Portsannet, the river, the scattered lights far up the valley, the grey beyond the harbour-wall....