scratch the
reckoning and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the
chief engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of
thirty years' service could have assumed one half of the
ancient-mariner air with which Harvey, first careful to spit over the
side, made public the schooner's position for that day, and then and
not till then relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in
all these things.

The said "hog-yoke," an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac, Blunt's
"Coast Pilot," and Bowditch's "Navigator" were all the weapons Disko
needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that was his spare eye.
Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to
"fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his strength was not equal to
continuous sounding in any sort of a sea, for calm weather with a
seven-pound lead on shoal water Disko used him freely. As Dan said:

"'Tain't soundin's dad wants. It's samples. Grease her up good, Harve."
Harvey would tallow the cup at the end, and carefully bring the sand,
shell, sludge, or whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and
smelt it and gave judgment As has been said, when Disko thought of cod
he thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and
experience, moved the We're Here from berth to berth, always with the
fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board.

But Disko's board was the Grand Bank--a triangle two hundred and fifty
miles on each side--a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog,
vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of
the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet.

For days they worked in fog--Harvey at the bell--till, grown familiar
with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather in
his mouth. But the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no
one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time. Harvey devoted
himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for
them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom's
instinct; Manuel's conch sounding thin and faint beside them. But it
was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey
dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the
lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on
the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was