wildly towards the door, but, seeing his exit barred by the Youth's large person, buried his face in his recovered napkin and groaned. I was horribly alarmed, and thought of fits and ptomaines and mere-malde-mer. But Jack's conduct was even more surprising than the Don's-he was prostrate too, but with laughter, not loud but deep! The stricken Don looked up. "I owe madame an apology -but a fool would have swallowed it.'" Jack's Euchred figs turned out to be pickled! I looked at the bottle they had come out of, but no warning was to be seen-only the remains of the figs, which looked deceptively attractive. Truly we see in a glass darkly! It was a horrid waste of cream! Our start next day did not seem notably different to the crewless efforts of the year before. Peter had ample weight to apply to a rope, but not much notion which rope to apply it to, and Tuncan was so busy trying to maintain his dignity as Skipper against the onslaughts of Jack's knowledge that he was not very efficient either, and the dual control made matters no easier for the amateur portion of the crew. Having the Youth there gave me the pleasing feeling of a schoolboy beginning his second term watching the miseries and mistakes of the new boys! But not being a boy, I had some compassion on my successor, and did my best to II. Get aft," growls Jack," and see if you can make fast the dinghy without sinking it." I was at my womanly work of "stowing below," and too absorbed in my irremediable tendency to forget something, to help or comfort the Youth. I never quite get used to either the beginning or end of a sail-getting under way and anchoring are both jobs to me filled with acute anxiety and undefined danger. The unforgivable sin is to ask un necessary questions at the time, and if I ask them afterwards the reconstruction of the circumstances and the ifs and ands" enlighten me no more than the post-mortems on bridge hands. But I have gradually discovered that the safest job is to be at the helm -it looks nice and showy doing the steering; but there is only a small selection of things one can do wrong-whereas the number of wrong ropes one can let go seems legion. your head ache even more," was all the sympathy Jack expressed. It was a day of stern initiation for the wretched Sandy! the next little thing to happen was when we cleared the southern entrance to Lamlash, and were heading south, the wind well aft the beam. Sandy was sitting beside me, and I was instructing him in the first elements of steering. Although I know much less about sailing than Jack, I am all the better fitted to teach, being near enough the level of my pupil to be neither pained nor horrified at his ignorance. Presently Jack shouted Let out some more mainsheet!" and I told Sandy what to do, this being a good firststep lesson. He unwound it off the cleat with conscientious alacrity, anxious to retrieve his character. Jack had commiseration enough not to expect the Youth to know the main halyards and purchases, but for some reason I have not yet fathomed any fool is supposed to know the topping-lifts by instinct. Just as we got off he was shouted to, "Let go the topping-lifts, Sandy." Unfortunately he chose the peak. The Don at the same moment obeyed the order instead, and "Don't take all the turns I leaped out of the cockpit off," I warned him, "or you with a yell, as the sail seemed won't be able to hold it-keep about to envelop me. My a round-turn" I had not deplorable lack of nerve served time to finish. The rope ran better than a gallant but un- through his hands like the enlightened seizing of the tiller, driving-band of a machine, and for the intelligent Skeletta at to stop it by hand was imonce came into the wind and possible. We were both hypnowaited for further orders. tised by the disaster, and gazed did not join the happy throng at the rapidly increasing space round the mast, as the sail between the sail and the yacht, was hoisted again, and the and then the worst happened. wretched Sandy tried to look The rope ran on and on-uncomposed, in spite of his tomato told fathoms of it, and-there complexion. I said to Jack was no knot at the end! So later that my heart ached for through the blocks it ran-till the poor Youth's discomfiture it fell helpless in the water, and even the Don's well-meant and Skeletta's mainsail was flapofficiousness. ping forward like a broken "It's lucky he didn't make wing. Sandy admitted to me I later that thoughts of suicide to see what dreadful sight was May be Heaven's distant lamps," or, in a prose version, that missing knot was not so much Sandy's complete undoing, as we had feared, but his saviour. Jack's owner pride was 80 shocked by this dereliction of duty on the part of the hired menials that a mere blunder mere blunder by a youthful amateur went almost unrebuked. Several things were said, and in all forms, as the dislocated wing was reduced. Oh, crew! to a crew, by, with, and from a crew! But Sandy was merely invited to go below before he brought the mast down, or... This ought to be the end of that day's misfortunes, but truth compels me to state that it was not. Horror was heaped on horror with a dreadful inevitableness, and all concentrating on the innocent Sandy, till he must have felt like the victim in a Greek tragedy. Jack had come aft with some information for the Youth's guidance, when suddenly his eyes glazed, and the words literally died upon his lips-the only language he could have used being unutterable; but the Don followed his stricken gaze, and said Gadzooks with a solemnity that made that absurd word quite awful. I almost thought Sandy had preferred suicide to sailing, and I also wheeled round from the helm in our wake. It was the dinghy -but no longer attached to us! It was bobbing along, with the painter hanging over the bows, as cheerful and independent as a puppy dragging a captured leash. Catching her again was even worse than recapturing an errant puppy! The manœuvre was most masterly in its handling, and every one was so anxious to efface the memory of the previous contretemps that they obeyed Jack's stern decrees with naval-like precision. This was a time when doing the steering was not the easiest job, and I felt I should round off the episode by sinking the dinghy, so Jack took it himself, and I stood by and looked alert and intelligent instead. We got the little creature all right, but she bit and scratched the paint a trifle as she was captured, and the anxious culprit got a thumb cut open and nearly squashed flat by holding the dinghy by the gunwale with a thumb outside, which is a form of immolation dear to the tyro, but which one soon learns to avoid. In this instance, it was only justice, and if by splitting all the other fingers Sandy could have wiped out the incident, no doubt he would have shed blood freely. The blame might be publicly bestowed on the crew, for the knot that was not; but I really felt I was the most to blame myself for having fallen into the objectionable habit of being technical in the wrong movement and big space is left. Still, I rather liked to think we were doing something great, and said to the Don "Going round the Mull can be rather dangerous-I mean literally dangerous; can't it? "Did you say littorally or literally?" he answered. “If the first, yes; if the second, perhaps." This took more thinking out than was worth while at the moment; it was more exciting to be told by Jack that both littorally and literally we were now closer to Ireland than Scotland. We caught our tides with a success which always savours to me of coincidence, but we had to beat up the west coast of Kintyre. Although it is the west coast, it has none of the characteristics of that damp but beautiful region; it is as low and sandy and uninteresting as the east coast of Scotland, its beauties being more apparent on shore, I suppose, where the golfer pursues his peculiar vocation-or, rather, vacation. I had only once been round the Mull before, and not in a sea like this, and found it very different from most of our coasting cruises. The big At- We had started with spacious lantic swell comes in broken views of the passage we would by nothing nearer than Amer- make. Even the White Knight ica, and it is a most exhilarating had forgotten to think out business climbing up and up probable misfortunes, and we the rollers, to swoop down the had hopes of running right on other side, while the oncoming to Oban; what is a night's one seems to be advancing to sail with a regular crew? But one's certain destruction. But the improbable mishappenings having surmounted a few, and of the day had undermined never merely gone through Jack's unusual optimism, and them, as I half feared, the he gloomily explained we would feeling of strangeness goes, and be safer at anchor, and that nothing but the joy of big we would put into Gigha. Duncan put forward a variety of reasons why this would not be a good plan at all. It was not a good anchorage, he said. Jack read aloud the chapter for the day from the Sailing Directions, and that reason was disposed of. It would be a peety, he contended, not to make a good passage while we had the wind. Jack ungratefully replied he did not consider a head wind a suitable one for a passage. Duncan doggedly went on "And then there iss no Post Aaffice, and the chentlemen will not be getting their newspapers or letters." So unexpected an objection, and such solicitude for our minor comforts, awoke Jack's suspicions. With Machiavellian strategy he said nothing at the moment, but presently began examining the water-beakers -then sounding the watertanks and then asked, not the Skipper, who was eyeing him uneasily, but Peter, who is too stupid to lie Duncan knew we were anxious to start at once when the others arrived; so when Jack asked if they had plenty of water on board, and all their own provisions, he soothingly assured him that "Yess, yess; that is quite right," knowing quite well he had neither the one nor the other, but that his questioner had no wish to hear any such answer. It would seem a short-sighted policy, but I suppose, like many improvidents, they trust "the Lord will provide "-and certainly in cruising the unexpected so often happens that they are almost as likely to go undetected as to become provisionless. should not try to make this anchorage, but pass to westward of the island'; but then I am not a stranger, and Skeletta is both smaller and handier than the craft the Sailing Directions are written for. But these professional skippers object to the less-known anchorages, and like to be near a pub. and their pals. I shall go and try and explain the place to him now, but I don't believe he understands a chart any better than Sandy does." The Don now wandered up from below. |