, the boats emptied of the
miscellaneous stores and odds and ends of sea-furniture, that
accumulate in the course of a voyage, the kedge sent ashore, and the
decks tidied down: a good three-quarters of an hour's work, during which
I raged about the deck like a man with a strong toothache. The
transition from the wild sea to the comparative immobility of the lagoon
had wrought strange distress among my nerves: I could not hold still
whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after
our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and
the irrational screaming of the seabirds saddened me like a dirge. It
was a relief when, with Nares, and a couple of hands, I might drop into
the boat and move off at last for the _Flying Scud_.

"She looks kind of pitiful, don't she?" observed the captain, nodding
towards the wreck, from which we were separated by some half a mile.
"Looks as if she didn't like her berth, and Captain Trent had used her
badly.--Give her ginger, boys," he added to the hands, "and you can all
have shore liberty to-night to see the birds and paint the town red."

We all laughed at the pleasantry, and the boat skimmed the faster over
the rippling face of the lagoon. The _Flying Scud_ would have seemed
small enough beside the wharves of San Francisco, but she was some
thrice the size of the _Norah Creina_, which had been so long our
continent; and as we craned up at her wall-sides, she impressed us with
a mountain magnitude. She lay head to the reef, where the huge blue wall
of the rollers was for ever ranging up and crumbling down; and to gain
her starboard side, we must pass below the stern. The rudder was hard
aport, and we could read the legend--

FLYING SCUD

HULL

On the other side, about the break of the poop, some half a fathom of
rope-ladder trailed over the rail, and by this we made our entrance.

She was a roomy ship inside, with a raised poop standing some three feet
higher than the deck, and a small forward house, for the men's bunks and
the galley, just abaft the foremast. There was one boat on the house,
and another and larger one, in beds on deck, on either hand of it. She
had been painted white, with tropical economy, outside and in; and we
found, later on, that the stanchions of the rail, hoops of the
scuttle-butt, etc., were picked out with green. At that time, however,
when we first stepped aboard, all was hidden under the droppings of
innume