that lashed the walls of the _Flying
Fish's_ pilot-house with a sound like that of the continuous crash of
hail. Although the ship's engines were set for a speed of only fifteen
knots, she was going through the water at something more than twenty;
yet, despite the fact that she was being swept from end to end by the
wildly breaking seas that followed her, her movements were so easy and
comfortable that Mildmay became quite enthusiastic upon the subject.
Shortly before noon they sighted and passed, within a quarter of a mile,
a big battleship. She was riding head to wind, and apparently steaming
ahead dead slow, or, at all events, merely at a speed sufficient to give
her steerage-way. She was making positively frightful weather of it,
diving deeply into every sea, as it met her, and literally burying
herself in a perfect smother of whiteness which had no time to flow off
her decks ere she plunged into the next sea. And, strangely enough,
within the hour they fell in with and passed a small gun-boat,
undoubtedly British. She was rigged as a barquentine. Her three
topmasts were housed, and she was hove-to under the lee clew of her
close-reefed topsail and a small storm-trysail. She was being flung
about in a manner that was absolutely appalling to look at, at one
moment standing almost upright, and anon thrown down on her beam-ends at
such an extreme angle that, to the onlookers, her decks seemed to be
almost vertical. Yet, with it all, she was making better weather of it
than her bigger sister, for though the spray flew over her in heavy
clouds, she seemed to be shipping very little green water. Still later,
they passed something that had the appearance of being a capsized junk,
after which they sighted nothing more; and on the following morning,
with sunrise, the gale broke, the sky cleared, the wind softened down
and finally shifted; and by the afternoon the north-east monsoon was
again blowing, and nothing remained of the gale save the turbulent sea
that it had knocked up. The same evening saw them abreast and about ten
miles to the north of the island of Tagulanda, and twenty-four hours
later they sighted and passed North Cape, on the island of Moro, and
swept into the great Pacific ocean.

The weather had by this time again become all that the voyagers could
desire. The sky was of a beautifully clear, rich blue tint, flecked
here and there with thin, fleecy, fine weather clouds; the monsoon swept
down upo