, log and observation approximated a
run of two hundred and fifty-two miles; the day before we ran two hundred
and forty, and the day before that two hundred and sixty-one. But one
does not appreciate the force of the wind. So balmy and exhilarating is
it that it is so much atmospheric wine. I delight to open my lungs and
my pores to it. Nor does it chill. At any hour of the night, while the
cabin lies asleep, I break off from my reading and go up on the poop in
the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.

I never knew before what the trade wind was. And now I am infatuated
with it. I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever mate
has the watch. Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr. Pike, on
these delicious nights, stands his first watch after midnight in his
pyjamas. He is a fearfully muscular man. Sixty-nine years seem
impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed like fleshings
against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge muscle. A splendid
figure of a man! What he must have been in the hey-day of youth two
score years and more ago passes comprehension.

The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream. Here, where
time is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the watches,
where every hour and half-hour is persistently brought to one's notice by
the striking of the ship's bells fore and aft, time ceases. Days merge
into days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for one, can never remember
the day of the week or month.

The _Elsinore_ is never totally asleep. Day and night, always, there are
the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at the
wheel, and the officer of the deck. I lie reading in my bunk, which is
on the weather side, and continually over my head during the long night
hours impact the footsteps of one mate or the other, pacing up and down,
and, as I well know, the man himself is for ever peering for'ard from the
break of the poop, or glancing into the binnacle, or feeling and gauging
the weight and direction of wind on his cheek, or watching the
cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud across the stars and the moon.
Always, always, there are wakeful eyes on the _Elsinore_.

Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o'clock, as I lay with the
printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an abrupt
outbreak of snarl from Mr. Pike. I located him as at the break of the
poop; and the man at whom he