reproached, calling
loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.

I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again. She nodded
and smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into snow-swirled space
from the edge of the top. I sat beside her, looking down into the snow
that hid the deck while it exaggerated the depth out of which we had
climbed.

We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air on a
steel stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into snow. We
had come to the tip of the world, and even that tip had ceased to be. But
no. Out of the snow, down wind, with motionless wings, driving fully
eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge albatross. He must have
been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. He had seen his danger ere
we saw him, and, tilting his body on the blast, he carelessly veered
clear of collision. His head and neck were rimed with age or frost--we
could not tell which--and his bright bead-eye noted us as he passed and
whirled away on a great circle into the snow to leeward.

Margaret's hand shot out to mine.

"It alone was worth the climb!" she cried. And then the _Elsinore_ flung
down, and Margaret's hand clutched tighter for holding, while from the
hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west wind drift
upon our decks.

Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
beneath us--the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-head
buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life back on
top the for'ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-drive of ocean,
and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr. Mellaire, with a
handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the tiller. And we saw the
Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house, swaying with casual surety
on the mad deck, as he spoke what must have been instructions to Mr.
Pike.

The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea. Shaggy gray-
beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the windward murky
gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the _Elsinore_, one moment
overtoppling her slender frailness, the next moment splashing a hundred
tons of water on her deck and flinging her skyward as they passed beneath
and foamed and crested from si