t as a sort of hero.

Ford looked at him hard, as he stood there with the tiller in his hand,
but he could not quite understand it, Dab was so quiet and
matter-of-course about it all; and, as for that youngster himself, he
had no idea that he was behaving any better than any other boy could,
should, and would have behaved in those very peculiar circumstances.

However that might be, the gay and buoyant little "Swallow," with her
signal lantern swinging at her mast-head, was soon dancing away through
the deepening darkness and the fog; and her steady-nerved young
commander was congratulating himself that there seemed to be a good deal
less of wind and sea, even if there was more of mist.

"I couldn't expect to have every thing to suit me," he said to himself.
"And now I hope we sha'n't run down anybody. Hullo! Isn't that a red
light, through the fog, yonder?"

CHAPTER XII.

HOW THE GAME OF "FOLLOW MY LEADER" CAN BE PLAYED AT SEA.

There was yet another gathering of human beings on the wind-swept
surface of the Atlantic that evening, to whose minds the minutes and
hours were going by with no small burden of anxiety to carry.

Not an anxiety, perhaps, as great as that of the three families over
there on the shore of the bay, or even of the three boys tossing along
through the fog in their bubble of a yacht; but the officers, and not a
few of the passengers and crew, of the great iron-builded ocean-steamer
were any thing but easy about the way their affairs were looking. It
would have been so much more agreeable if they could have looked at them
at all.

Had they no pilot on board?

To be sure they had, for he had come on board in the usual way, as they
drew near their intended port; but they had somehow seemed to bring that
fog along with them, and the captain had a half-defined suspicion that
neither the pilot nor he himself knew exactly where they now were. That
is a bad condition for a great ship to be in at any time, and especially
when it was drawing so near a coast which calls for good seamanship and
skilful pilotage in the best of weather.

The captain would not for any thing have confessed his doubt to the
pilot, nor the pilot his to the captain; and that was where the real
danger lay, after all. If they could only have choked down their pride,
and permitted themselves to talk of their possible peril, it would very
likely have disappeared. That is, they could at least have decided to
stop the