the noose for twenty-four hours! Now let's go to dinner.'

This mid-day meal was composed of a piece of corned beef, some ship's biscuit and cheese. I might have found a better appetite had there been less wind, and had the boat's head been pointed the other way. All the time now the lugger was swarming through it at the rate of steam. There was already a strong sea running too, the storminess of which we should have felt had we had it on the bow; but our arrowy speeding before it softened the fierceness of its sweeping hurls, and the wind for the same reason came with half the weight it really had, though we must have been reefed down to a mere strip of canvas had we been close-hauled. The sun shone with a dim and windy light out of the sky that was hard with a pie-balding of cloud.

'What is the weather going to prove?' I asked Abraham.

He munched leisurely, with a slow look to windward, and answered, ''Tain't going to be worse nor ye see it.'

'Have you a barometer?' said I.

'No,' he answered; 'they're no good. In a boat arter this here pattern, what's the use of knowing what's agoing to come? It's only a-letting go a rope an' you're under bare poles. Marcury's all very well in a big ship, where ye may be taken aback clean out o' the sky, and lose every spar down to the stumps of the lower masts.'

Though I constantly kept a look-out, sending my eyes roaming over either bow past the smooth and foaming curves of seas rushing ahead of us, I was very sensible, as I have said, that nothing was to be done in such hollow waters as we were now rushing through, though we should sight a score of homeward-bounders. Yet, spite of the wonderful life that strong northerly wind swept into the ocean, nothing whatever showed during the rest of the day, if I except a single tip of canvas that hovered for about a quarter of an hour some two or three leagues down in the east, like a little wreath of mountain mist. The incessant pouring of the wind past the ear, the shouting and whistling of it as it flashed spray-laden off each foaming peak in chase of us, grew inexpressibly sickening and wearying to me, coming as it did after our long exposure to the fierce weather of the earlier days. The thwarts or lockers brought our heads above the line of the gunwale, and to remedy this I asked leave to drag a spare sail aft into the bottom of the boat, and there Helga and I sat, somewhat sheltered at least, and capable of conversing without being obliged to cry out.

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