y, and waited for Captain Pomery to
recover.

Though the sea went down even more quickly than it had arisen, the
pumps kept us fairly busy. All that night, under a clear and starry
sky, we steered for the north-east with the wind brisk upon our
starboard quarter.

"I have no chart,
No compass but a heart,"

quoted I in mischief to Nat. But Nat, having passed through a real
gale, had saved not sufficient fondness for his verse to blush, for
it. We should have been mournful for old Worthyvale, but that night
we knew only that it was good, being young, to have escaped death.
Under the stars we made bad jokes on Mr. Badcock's sea-sickness, and
sang in chorus to Mr. Fett's solos--

"With a fa-la, fa-la, fa-la-la!
To all you ladies now at land . . ."

Next morning Captain Pomery (whose hurt was a pretty severe
concussion of the skull, the explosion having flung him into the
panelling of the ship's cabin, and against the knee of a beam)
returned to duty, and professed himself able, with help, to take a
reckoning. He relieved us of another anxiety by producing a
pocket-compass from his fob.

My father held the sextant for him, while Nat, under instructions,
worked out the sum. With a compass, upon a chart spread on the deck,
I pricked out the bearings--with a result that astonished all as I
leapt up and stared across the bows.

"Why, lad, by the look of you we should be running ashore!"
exclaimed my father.

"And so we should be at this moment," said I, "were not the reckoning
out."

Captain Pomery reached out for the paper. "The reckoning is right
enough," said he, after studying it awhile.

"Then on what land, in Heaven's name, are we running?" my father
demanded testily.

"Why, on Corsica," I answered, pointing with my compass's foot as he
bent over the chart. "On Corsica. Where else?"

It wanted between three and four hours of sunset when we made the
landfall and assured ourselves that what appeared so like a low cloud
on the east-north-eastern horizon was indeed the wished-for island.
We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first
maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and
therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for
darkness.

Against this, Captain Pomery maintained--

1. That we were carrying a fair wind, and the Lord knew how long
that would hold.

2. That the moon would rise in less than three ho