hotter. Paul wondered how the Clytemnestra—even though she had been built on the Clyde and sailed under the protection of that celebrated Britannia whom as a child, he had pictured, on the seashore with a school footrule in her hand, "ruling" the waves!—he wondered how she had the courage to drive on, under such handicaps, until the second mate, who swore by the Macrihanish, enlightened him by saying, apropos of the Ezra R. Smith "What, that sieve! That floating casket! Why I went aboard o' her in Rosario once. She liked to never got there, at that. The only sailin' she done was backwards till the skipper run short o' booze, eighty-odd days out, and come on deck for the first time and filled her sails with cusses. God help any mother's son that ships on that fire bucket. She's one o' your hunch-back wooden old-timers—except that it ain't lucky to touch her hump. She'll part amidships one o' these days. Good enough in her time, twenty-five year ago. I mind once, when I was boatswain aboard the Macrihanish—" but Paul had seen the captain's form emerging from the chart-room and scurried off to polish the knives.
To-day, a Sunday and nearly a week out, it was pleasant to sit on the anchor and, for the first time since losing sight of land, really take stock of the situation. Up to this moment he had been too busy to meditate. The first hours on board, when the citadel, then the broad gate of the outer harbour, and finally the whole coast-line dropped away, had been more wonderful than anything in his experience. Never should he forget his strange exaltation as he had stood staring up at the little black figures crooked over the yards and watched the grey sails loosen and unfold and finally come clanking, creaking, flapping and ballooning down, till they made vast, bulging oblongs between the tapering yards and were securely held in place by a system of blocks and braces.
The unerring skill with which each man selected one
