“I,” he finished with emphasis, “will not be among them.”

  “Where will you be?” asked Winge.

  But Erik Bull was already headed aft to his work. A snatch of song, bawled from powerful lungs, came back to the others. They all knew English, but it took them a moment to get the drift.

  “Who’s that knocking at my door?’

  Said the fair young maiden.

  ‘Oh, it’s only me, from over the sea,*

  Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.

  ‘I’ve sailed the seas from shore to shore,

  I’ll never sail the seas no more.

  Now open up this blank-blank door!*

  Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.”

  THE END

  An aside:

  It has been pointed out that:

  Besides the third installment of The High Crusade, the September, 1960 issue of Astounding/Analog has a Poul Anderson novelette, Barnacle Bull.

  It was rare for a magazine to run two stories under the same author’s name in an issue: the novelette was, therefore, credited to Winston P. Sanders, a pseudonym that Poul Anderson used a number of times.

  The name is a joke. If you’ve read Winnie-the-Pooh, you may recall that Winnie is living “under the name of Sanders.” (The Ernest Shepherd illustration, from 1928, shows him sitting on a log porch; the sign over the door behind him reads Mr. Sanders.)

  Poul was crediting Barnacle Bull to Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Out of interest & just for fun – here is the illustration too,

 

 

  Poul Anderson, Barnacle Bull (ss)

 

 

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