the look-out for. Meanwhile, he
availed himself of the opportunity to prepare a certain piece of
apparatus that he had employed his leisure in devising, and which he
thought might possibly prove useful on occasion. "I've been thinking,"
said he to me on the morning after the calm had set in, "that it mayn't
always be convanient for the schooner to go through the wather at her
best speed, so I've devised a thriflin' arrangement that'll modherate
her paces widhout annyone out of the craft bein' anny the wiser." And
therewith he ordered a good stout hawser to be roused up on deck; and
from this he had a length of some fifteen fathoms cut off, all along the
middle part of which he caused a dozen pigs of ballast to be securely
lashed. This done, he ordered the bight, with the pigs attached, to be
passed under the ship's bottom, and the two ends of the hawser to be
passed inboard through the port and starboard midship ports and well
secured, when we had a drag underneath the schooner that would certainly
exercise a very marked effect upon her sailing, without making a
sufficient disturbance in the water to reveal the fact that trickery was
being resorted to.

Towards the close of the afternoon the aspect of the sky seemed to
promise that ere long we might hope for a welcome change of weather; the
deep, brilliant blue of the unclouded dome became blurred as though it
were gradually being overspread by a thin and semi-transparent curtain
of mist, which gradually resolved itself into that streaky, feathery
appearance called by seamen "mare's-tails"; and a bank of horizontal
grey cloud gathered in the western quarter, into which the sun at length
plunged in a glare of fiery crimson and smoky purple that had all the
appearance of a great atmospheric conflagration. A short, steep swell,
too, gathered from the westward, causing the inert schooner to roll and
wallow until she was shipping water over both gunwales, and her masts
were working and grinding so furiously in the partners that we had to
lift the coats and drive the wedges home afresh, as well as to get up
preventer-backstays and rolling tackles.

"There is a breeze, and a strong one too, behind all this," remarked
Ryan to me, "and it will give us an opportunity to test the little
hooker's mettle. I wish it would come and be done with it, for by the
powers I'm gettin' mighty toired of this stoyle of thing," as the
schooner's counter squattered down with a thud and a s