best left to the log-line.'

'So she is,' said Jacob.

'And you have no doubt of accurately striking the port of Sydney without
troubling yourselves about your longitude?'

'Ne'er a doubt,' said Abraham.

'Or if so be as a doubt should come up, then heave the log, says I,'
broke in Jacob.

Their manner of speaking warned me to conceal my amazement, that under
other conditions could not have been without merriment. They told me
they had left Penzance on the morning of Monday, while it was still
blowing heavily. 'But we saw that the breeze,' Abraham said, 'was agoing
to fail, and so there was no call to stop for the wedder;' yet they had
hardly run the land out of sight when they sprang their mast in the
jump of a very hollow sea. 'There was no use trying to ratch back agin
that sea and breeze,' said Abraham; 'so we stepped our spare mast and
laid the wounded chap in his place; but if the wedder be as bad off the
Cape as I've heerd talk of, I allow we'll be needing a rig-out o' spars
if we're to reach Australey; and what'll have to be done'll be to fall
in with some wessel as'll oblige us.'

Considering they were seafaring men, this prodigious confidence in luck
and chance was not less wonderful than the venture they were upon. But
it was for me to question and listen, not to criticise.

'They will never reach Australia,' Helga whispered.

'They are English seamen,' said I softly.

'No, Hugh--boatmen,' said she, giving me my name as easily as though we
had been brother and sister. 'And what will they do without longitude?'

'Grope their way,' I whispered, 'after the manner of the early marines
who achieved everything in the shape of seamanship and discovery in
"barkes," as they called them, compared to which this lugger is as a
thousand-ton ship to a Gravesend wherry.'

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