better showing he intended
doing all the fighting on the _Elsinore_ himself.

It is a feat beyond me to realize that he is sixty-nine years old. And
when I look at the tremendous build of him and at his fearful,
man-handling hands, I conjure up a vision of him avenging Captain
Somers's murder.

Life is cruel. Amongst the _Elsinore's_ five thousand tons of coal are
thousands of rats. There is no way for them to get out of their steel-
walled prison, for all the ventilators are guarded with stout wire-mesh.
On her previous voyage, loaded with barley, they increased and
multiplied. Now they are imprisoned in the coal, and cannibalism is what
must occur among them. Mr. Pike says that when we reach Seattle there
will be a dozen or a score of survivors, huge fellows, the strongest and
fiercest. Sometimes, passing the mouth of one ventilator that is in the
after wall of the chart-house, I can hear their plaintive squealing and
crying from far beneath in the coal.

Other and luckier rats are in the 'tween decks for'ard, where all the
spare suits of sails are stored. They come out and run about the deck at
night, steal food from the galley, and lap up the dew. Which reminds me
that Mr. Pike will no longer look at Possum. It seems, under his
suggestion, that Wada trapped a rat in the donkey-engine room. Wada
swears that it was the father of all rats, and that, by actual
measurement, it scaled eighteen inches from nose to the tip of tail.
Also, it seems that Mr. Pike and Wada, with the door shut in the former's
room, pitted the rat against Possum, and that Possum was licked. They
were compelled to kill the rat themselves, while Possum, when all was
over, lay down and had a fit.

Now Mr. Pike abhors a coward, and his disgust with Possum is profound. He
no longer plays with the puppy, nor even speaks to him, and, whenever he
passes him on the deck, glowers sourly at him.

I have been reading up the South Atlantic Sailing Directions, and I find
that we are now entering the most beautiful sunset region in the world.
And this evening we were favoured with a sample. I was in my quarters,
overhauling my books, when Miss West called to me from the foot of the
chart-house stairs:

"Mr. Pathurst!--Come quick! Oh, do come quick! You can't afford to miss
it!"

Half the sky, from the zenith to the western sea-line, was an astonishing
sheet of pure, pale, even gold. And through this sheen, on the horizon,
burned the su