t to me to get there a fortnight ahead of
the _Kingfisher_. What's the thing like that you've invented, Mister,
and could we knock it up out o' the stuff as we've got aboard?"

"Oh yes!" answered Cunningham, "I have kept strictly in mind our
capabilities in the preparation of my sketch. I could easily devise a
much better and more efficient concern, I am sure; but that would be
quite useless to you, because we have neither the materials nor the
skilled labour aboard to produce it. But," he continued, producing a
pencil and paper and beginning to sketch rapidly, "I think we might
manage to knock together a contrivance of this sort. There would be two
of them, you understand, one on each side of the ship. This represents
a stout timber frame, which would be secured in place by short lengths
of chain bowsed taut by tackles, so that it would remain rigidly in
position. It would reach from the rail down to about three feet below
the surface of the water. This outrigger arrangement, which should be
about nine feet long, will serve as the attachment for what we may call
a fin, made of flexible planking securely fixed at its fore end to the
outrigger, but quite free to move at the other end. Now this fin, being
submerged when the frame is fixed in place, will be acted upon by the
pressure of the water as the ship rolls, and will bend alternately
upward and downward at an angle, the effect being that every time the
ship rolls the bent fin will force backward a considerable quantity of
water, or, what is the same thing, will have a tendency to thrust the
ship forward at a rate which I estimate at--well, say about three knots
per hour."

"Three knots an hour," repeated the skipper. "'Tain't very much, is it?
I thought, maybe, that you'd be able to fix up somethin' that 'd shove
her along at about ten or twelve knots."

Cunningham laughed as he shook his head. "Come, come, Captain!" he
protested, "be reasonable. To get ten or twelve knots out of this
schooner you would require a steam engine of some eighty to a hundred
horse power."

"Ay," admitted the skipper, rather unwillingly, "I s'pose I should.
Three knots an hour. That's, in round figures, seventy miles from noon
to noon. And that, for, say, fourteen days, is--how much?"

"Nine hundred and eighty miles; call it a thousand," answered
Cunningham.

"A thousand miles. Jings! It mounts up when you come to look at it
that way," averred the skipper. "Look her