tor, 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 pan-jammers, 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, now vastly swollen,
indefatigably hunted us. I stood on deck, choking with fear; I seemed to
lose all power upon my limbs; my knees were as paper when she plunged
into the murderous valleys; my heart collapsed when some black mountain
fell in avalanche beside her counter, and the water, that was more than
spray, swept round my ankles like a torrent. I was conscious of but one
strong desire--to bear myself decently in my terrors, and, whatever
should happen to my life, preserve my character: as the captain said, we
are a queer kind of beasts. Breakfast-time came, and I made shift to
swallow some hot tea. Then I must stagger below to take the time,
reading the chronometer with dizzy eyes, and marvelling the w