, forbidding coast lay
the Mackie selection; it was over this expanse of sea they two had stood
and looked when they said farewell--he had even heard tell that the
lights from their cottage window, the bright glow from the kitchen fire,
were plainly visible to ships at sea, so close was she. And he wondered
to himself should he see those lights to-night. Hardly. He lay there in
his bunk and listened to the row in the rigging. Things had not mended
evidently since he went below. Gone was the summer and the bright
November sunshine, the wind from the south was coming up cold and chill,
and the prospect of four hours to-night on a very cold, wet, bleak poop
was anything but inviting.

"It 's just going eight bells, sir." He scrambled out of his bunk and
into some clothes and oilskins, and was standing alongside the mate
under the lee of the weather cloth in the rigging, by the time the watch
got aft. They were the average crew of a sailing ship, men from every
nation under the sun, and as they passed slowly round the capstan, their
shoulders hunched to their ears, each man answered sullenly to his name.
Not that they bore the second mate any ill-will, but Jack ashore spends
his last weeks in riotous living and suffers a slow recovery for the
first few days of the voyage. Besides the night was bitter cold, the
wind that whistled shrilly through the rigging already bore on its chill
breath drops of icy rain; there was no prospect of things mending, and
after the hot summer days at Port Melbourne extra wraps--indeed
any clothes in the fo'c'sle beyond what each man stood up in--were
conspicuous by their absence. Merchant Jack is a thriftless beggar at
best, and who could have foreseen wintry weather like this?

"Andersen!" called the mate, as a tall, fair haired Swede, his hairy
breast bare to the cold night air, stepped forward.

"Sir."

"Muntz!"

"Herr."

"Reed!"

"'Ere, sir."

"Portross!"

"Sah-h."

What a motley crew they were! Swedes and Germans, cockneys and niggers,
they passed on till the two watches had answered to their names, and the
last man was a Russian Finn, black-haired and swarthy, with a flat face
and eyes like a Tartar.

"They Finns," said the bo'sun confidentially to Harper, "is just pisen.
Never knew no ship come to any good as carried em.

"Pooh!" said the second mate, who was not troubled with superstitious
fears; besides the bo'sun made the same remark every time the watches
were muste