r conscience.
'Weren't you delighted yourself to get to the Baltic? It must be a
wonderful contrast to what you described. Did you ever see another
yacht there?'

'Only one,' he answered. 'Good night!'

'Good night!'

V. Wanted, a North Wind

NOTHING disturbed my rest that night, so adaptable is youth and so
masterful is nature. At times I was remotely aware of a threshing of
rain and a humming of wind, with a nervous kicking of the little
hull, and at one moment I dreamt I saw an apparition by candle-light
of Davies, clad in pyjamas and huge top-boots, grasping a misty
lantern of gigantic proportions. But the apparition mounted the
ladder and disappeared, and I passed to other dreams.

A blast in my ear, like the voice of fifty trombones, galvanized me
into full consciousness. The musician, smiling and tousled, was at my
bedside, raising a foghorn to his lips with deadly intention. 'It's a
way we have in the 'Dulcibella',' he said, as I started up on one
elbow. 'I didn't startle you much, did I?' he added.

'Well, I like the _mattinata_ better than the cold douche,' I
answered, thinking of yesterday.

'Fine day and magnificent breeze!' he answered. My sensations this
morning were vastly livelier than those of yesterday at the same
hour. My limbs were supple again and my head clear. Not even the
searching wind could mar the ecstasy of that plunge down to smooth,
seductive sand, where I buried greedy fingers and looked through a
medium blue, with that translucent blue, fairy-faint and angel-pure,
that you see in perfection only in the heart of ice. Up again to sun,
wind, and the forest whispers from the shore; down just once more to
see the uncouth anchor stabbing the sand's soft bosom with one rusty
fang, deaf and inert to the 'Dulcibella's' puny efforts to drag him
from his prey. Back, holding by the cable as a rusty clue from heaven
to earth, up to that _bourgeois_ little maiden's bows; back to
breakfast, with an appetite not to be blunted by condensed milk and
somewhat _passe_ bread. An hour later we had dressed the 'Dulcibella'
for the road, and were foaming into the grey void of yesterday, now a
noble expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills,
their every outline vivid in the rain-washed air.

I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this first sail into the open,
though I was keenly anxious to do so. I felt the thrill of those
forward leaps, heard that persuasive song the foam