g admiration for her gallant staunchness,
that amused and at times obliterated my terrors for myself. God bless
every man that swung a mallet on that tiny and strong hull! It was not
for wages only that he laboured, but to save men's lives.

All the rest of the day, and all the following night, I sat in the
corner or lay wakeful in my bunk; and it was only with the return of
morning that a new phase of my alarms drove me once more on deck. A
gloomier interval I never passed. Johnson and Nares steadily relieved
each other at the wheel and came below. The first glance of each was
at the glass, which he repeatedly knuckled and frowned upon; for it was
sagging lower all the time. Then, if Johnson were the visitor, he would
pick a snack out of the cupboard, and stand, braced against the table,
eating it, and perhaps obliging me with a word or two of his hee-haw
conversation: how it was "a son of a gun of a cold night on deck, Mr.
Dodd" (with a grin); how "it wasn't no night for panjammers, he could
tell me": having transacted all which, he would throw himself down
in his bunk and sleep his two hours with compunction. But the captain
neither ate nor slept. "You there, Mr. Dodd?" he would say, after the
obligatory visit to the glass. "Well, my son, we're one hundred and four
miles" (or whatever it was) "off the island, and scudding for all we're
worth. We'll make it to-morrow about four, or not, as the case may be.
That's the news. And now, Mr. Dodd, I've stretched a point for you;
you can see I'm dead tired; so just you stretch away back to your bunk
again." And with this attempt at geniality, his teeth would settle
hard down on his cigar, and he would pass his spell below staring and
blinking at the cabin lamp through a cloud of tobacco smoke. He has
told me since that he was happy, which I should never have divined. "You
see," he said, "the wind we had was never anything out of the way; but
the sea was really nasty, the schooner wanted a lot of humouring, and
it was clear from the glass that we were close to some dirt. We might
be running out of it, or we might be running right crack into it. Well,
there's always something sublime about a big deal like that; and it kind
of raises a man in his own liking. We're a queer kind of beasts, Mr.
Dodd."

The morning broke with sinister brightness; the air alarmingly
transparent, the sky pure, the rim of the horizon clear and strong
against the heavens. The wind and the wild seas, n