schooner."

"You surprise me, sir! A consort is no bad thing, when a craft is
a-sealin' in a high latitude. The ice makes such ticklish times, that, for
me, I'm always glad to know there is such a chance for taking a fellow
off, should there happen to be a wreck."

"All that is very true, but there are reasons which may tell against it. I
have heard of some islands where seals abound, and a consort is not quite
so necessary to take them, as when one is wrecked."

"That alters the case, Captain Gar'ner. Nobody is obliged to tell of his
sealing station. I was aboard one of the very first craft that found out
that the South Shetlands was a famous place for seals, and no one among us
thought it necessary to tell it to all the world. Some men are weak enough
to put sich discoveries in the newspapers; but, for my part, I think it
quite enough to put them in the log."

"That schooner must have the current with her, she comes down so fast. She
'II be abreast of the Horn in half an hour longer, Stephen. We will wait,
and see what she would be at."

Gardiner's prediction was true. In half an hour, the Sea Lion of Holmes'
Hole glided past the rocky pyramid of the Horn, distant from it less than
a mile. Had it been the object of her commander to pass into the Pacific,
he might have done so with great apparent ease. Even with a south-west
wind, that which blows fully half the time in those seas, it would have
been in his power to lay past the islands, and soon get before it. A
north-east course, with a little offing, will clear the islands, and when
a vessel gets as far north as the main land, it would take her off the
coast.

But Daggett had no intention of doing anything of the sort. He was looking
for his consort, which he had hoped to find somewhere near the cape.
Disappointed in this expectation, after standing far enough west to make
certain nothing was in sight in that quarter, he hauled up on an easy
bowline, and stood to the southward. Roswell was right glad to see this,
inasmuch as it denoted ignorance of the position of the islands he sought.
They lay much farther to the westward; and no sooner was he sure of the
course steered by the other schooner, than he hastened down to the boat,
in order to get his own vessel under way, to profit by the breeze.

Two hours later, the Sea Lion of Oyster Pond glanced through the passage
which led into the ocean, on an ebb-tide. By that time, the other vessel
had disappeared in t