h them; but Donald
was intent upon the thing he was doing, and he was not afraid. Then
came the time--they were but ten yards off the standing edge--when
North struck his gaff too deep into the water. He lost his balance,
struggled to regain it, failed--and fell off. Before Donald was awake
to the danger, the edge of the pan sank under him, and he, too,
toppled off.

Donald had learned to swim now. When he came to the surface, his
father was breast-high in the water, looking for him.

"Are you all right, Donald?" said his father.

"Yes, sir."

"Can you reach the ice alone?"

"Yes, sir," said Donald, quietly.

Alexander Bludd and Bill Stevens helped them up on the standing edge,
and they were home by the kitchen fire in half an hour.

"'Twas bravely done, b'y," said Job.

So Donald North learned that perils feared are much more terrible
than perils faced. He had a courage of the finest kind, in the
following days of adventure, now close upon him, had young Donald.

CHAPTER VII

_In Which Bagg, Imported From the Gutters of London, Lands
At Ruddy Cove From the Mail-Boat, Makes the Acquaintance
of Jimmie Grimm and Billy Topsail, and Tells Them 'E Wants
to Go 'Ome. In Which, Also, the Way to Catastrophe Is
Pointed_

The mail-boat comes to Ruddy Cove in the night, when the shadows are
black and wet, and the wind, blowing in from the sea, is charged with
a clammy mist. The lights in the cottages are blurred by the fog. They
form a broken line of yellow splotches rounding the harbour's edge.
Beyond is deep night and a wilderness into which the wind drives. In
the morning the fog still clings to the coast. Within the cloudy wall
it is all glum and dripping wet. When a veering wind sweeps the fog
away, there lies disclosed a world of rock and forest and fuming sea,
stretching from the end of the earth to the summits of the inland
hills--a place of ruggedness and hazy distances; of silence and a
vast, forbidding loneliness.

It was on such a morning that Bagg, the London gutter-snipe, having
been landed at Ruddy Cove from the mail-boat the night before--this
being in the fall before Donald North played ferryman between the
standing edge and the floe--it was on such a foggy morning, I say,
that Bagg made the acquaintance of Billy Topsail and Jimmie Grimm.

"Hello!" said Billy Topsail.

"Hello!" Jimmie Grimm echoed.

"You blokes live 'ere?" Bagg whined.

"Uh-huh," said Billy Topsail