in the rowlocks, ready
for clearing the harbor. I took one of them, and bent myself willingly
to the light task. There was less wind than I had expected, but what
there was blew in our favor. We were very quickly beyond the pier-head,
where a group of idlers was always gathered, who sent after us a few
warning shouts. Nothing could be more exhilarating than our onward
progress. I felt as if I had been a prisoner, with, chains which had
pressed heavily yet insensibly upon me, and that now I was free. I drew
into my lungs the fresh, bracing, salt air of the sea, with a deep sigh
of delight.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

A PATIENT IN SARK.

It struck me after a while that my friend Tardif was unusually silent.
The shifting of the sails appeared to give him plenty to do; and to my
surprise, instead of keeping to the ordinary course, he ran recklessly
as it seemed across the _grunes_, which lie all about the bed of the
channel between Guernsey and Sark. These _grunes_ are reefs, rising a
little above low water, but, as the tide was about half-flood, they were
a few feet below it; yet at times there was scarcely enough depth to
float us over them, while the brown seaweed torn from their edges lay in
our wake, something like the swaths of grass in a meadow after the
scythe has swept through it. Now and then came a bump and a scrape of
the keel against their sharp ridges. The sweat stood in beads upon
Tardif's face, and his thick hair fell forward over his forehead, where
the great veins in the temples were purple and swollen. I spoke to him
after a heavier bump over the _grunes_ than any we had yet come to.

"Tardif," I said, "we are shaving the weeds a little too close, aren't
we?"

"Look behind you, Dr. Martin," he answered, shifting the sails a
little.

I did not look behind us. We were more than half-way over the channel,
and Guernsey lay four miles or so west of us; but instead of the clear
outline of the island standing out against the sky, I could see nothing
but a bank of white fog. The afternoon sun was shining brightly over it,
but before long it would dip into its dense folds. The fogs about our
islands are peculiar. You may see them form apparently thick blocks of
blanched vapor, with a distinct line between the atmosphere where the
haze is and where it is not. To be overtaken by a fog like this, which
would almost hide Tardif at one end of the boat from me at the other,
would be no laughing matter in a sea