and putting 'em on again like stones, was a mighty different thing
to getting all our feet into something dry and warm. 'Who was Sal?'
Well, poor Sal was a rum 'un, but she's dead. It's a queer thing, we
only lost one hand, and that was the carpenter, and he died the same day
poor Sal was murdered down Bermondsey way. It's a queer world, this, no
matter where you're cruising! But there's one thing you'll learn if you
live as long as me; a woman's heart and the ocean deep's much about the
same. You can't reckon on 'em, and GOD A'mighty, as made 'em, alone
knows the depths of 'em; but as our doctor used to say (and he was
always fetching things out and putting 'em into bottles), it's the rough
weather brings the best of it up."

This was not a cheerful story, but it was soon driven out of our heads
by others. Fog was the prevailing topic; yarns of the fogs of the
northern seas being varied by "red fogs" off the Cape de Verd Islands;
and not the least dismal of the narratives was told by Alister
Auchterlay, of a fog on Ben Nevis, in which his own grandmother's uncle
perished, chiefly, as it appeared, in consequence of a constitutional
objection to taking advice, or to "going back upon his word," when he
had made up his mind to do something or to go somewhere. And this drew
from the boatswain the sad fate of a comrade of his, who had sailed
twice round the world, been ship-wrecked four times, in three
collisions, and twice aboard ships that took fire, had Yellow Jack in
the West Indies, and sunstroke at the Cape, lost a middle finger from
frost-bite in the north of China, and one eye in a bit of a row at San
Francisco, and came safe home after it all, and married a snug widow in
a pork-shop at Wapping Old Stairs, and got out of his course steering
home through a London fog on Guy Fawkes Day, and walked straight into
the river, and was found at low tide next morning with a quid of tobacco
in his cheek, and nothing missing about him but his glass eye, which
shows, as the boatswain said, that "Fogs is fogs anywhere, and a nasty
thing too."

It was towards dark, when we had been fourteen days at sea, that our own
fog suddenly lifted, and the good news flew from mouth to mouth that we
might be "in about midnight." But the fog came down again, and I do not
think that the whole fourteen days put together felt so long as the
hours of that one night through which the fog-horn blew, and we longed
for day.

I was leaning against t