. They roll across the North Sea from their home in the marshes of
Holland on the face of the waters, and the mariner, groping his way with
dripping eyelashes and a rosy face through them, can look up and see the
blue sky through the rifts overhead. When the fog-bank touches land it
rises, slowly lifted by the warm breath of the field.

On the coast-line it lies low; a mile inland it begins to break into
rifts, so that any one working his way down one of the tidal rivers,
sails in the counting of twenty seconds from sunshine into a pearly
shadow. Five miles inland there is a transparent veil across the blue
sky slowly sweeping toward the west, and rising all the while, until
those who dwell on the higher lands of Essex and Suffolk perceive
nothing but a few fleecy clouds high in the heavens.

The lugger was hardly moving, for the tide had only turned half an hour
ago.

"Provided," the Captain had muttered within the folds of his woollen
scarf rolled round and round his neck until it looked like a dusky
life-belt--"provided that they are ringing their bell on the Shipwash,
we shall find our way into the open. Always sea-sick, this traveller,
always seasick!"

And he turned with a kindly laugh to Loo Barebone, who was lying on a
heap of old sails by the stern rail, concealing as well as he could the
pangs of a consuming hunger.

"One sees that you will never be a sailor," added the man from Fecamp,
with that rough humour which sailors use.

"Perhaps I do not want to be one," replied Barebone, with a ready
gaiety which had already made him several friends on this tarry vessel,
although the voyage had lasted but four days.

"Listen," interrupted the Captain, holding up a mittened hand. "Listen!
I hear a bell, or else it is my conscience."

Barebone had heard it for some time. It was the bell-buoy at the mouth
of Harwich River. But he did not deem it necessary for one who was a
prisoner on board, and no sailor, to interfere in the navigation of a
vessel now making its way to the Faroe fisheries for the twentieth time.

"My conscience," he observed, "rings louder than that."

The Captain took a turn round the tiller with a rope made fast to the
rail for the purpose, and went to the side of the ship, lifting his nose
toward the west.

"It is the land," he said. "I can smell it. But it is only the Blessed
Virgin who knows where we are."

He turned and gave a gruff order to a man half hidden in the mist in the
wai