rt warm showers,
grumbling men whirled the heavy yards from side to side; they caught
hold of the soaked ropes with groans and sighs, while their officers,
sulky and dripping with rain water, unceasingly ordered them about in
wearied voices. During the short respites they looked with disgust
into the smarting palms of their stiff hands, and asked one another
bitterly:--"Who would be a sailor if he could be a farmer?" All the
tempers were spoilt, and no man cared what he said. One black night,
when the watch, panting in the heat and half-drowned with the rain,
had been through four mortal hours hunted from brace to brace, Belfast
declared that he would "chuck the sea for ever and go in a steamer."
This was excessive, no doubt. Captain Allistoun, with great
self-control, would mutter sadly to Mr. Baker:--"It is not so bad--not so
bad," when he had managed to shove, and dodge, and manoeuvre his smart
ship through sixty miles in twenty-four hours. From the doorstep of the
little cabin, Jimmy, chin in hand, watched our distasteful labours with
insolent and melancholy eyes. We spoke to him gently--and out of his
sight exchanged sour smiles.

Then, again, with a fair wind and under a clear sky, the ship went
on piling up the South Latitude. She passed outside Madagascar and
Mauritius without a glimpse of the land. Extra lashings were put on the
spare spars. Hatches were looked to. The steward in his leisure moments
and with a worried air tried to fit washboards to the cabin doors. Stout
canvas was bent with care. Anxious eyes looked to the westward, towards
the cape of storms. The ship began to dip into a southwest swell, and
the softly luminous sky of low latitudes took on a harder sheen from
day to day above our heads: it arched high above the ship vibrating and
pale, like an immense dome of steel, resonant with the deep voice of
freshening gales. The sunshine gleamed cold on the white curls of black
waves. Before the strong breath of westerly squalls the ship, with
reduced sail, lay slowly over, obstinate and yielding. She drove to and
fro in the unceasing endeavour to fight her way through the invisible
violence of the winds: she pitched headlong into dark smooth hollows;
she struggled upwards over the snowy ridges of great running seas; she
rolled, restless, from side to side, like a thing in pain. Enduring and
valiant, she answered to the call of men; and her slim spars waving for
ever in abrupt semicircles, seemed to be