, how does this strike you?"

It struck us--I don't think any got away. I expected every minute to
land in the hereafter, and it got so that the prospect looked kind of
inviting, if only to get somewheres where 'twas warm. That February wind
went in at the top of my stiff hat and whizzed out through the legs of
my thin Sunday pants till I felt for all the world like the ventilating
pipe on an ice-chest. I could see why Phil was wearing the bed-clothes;
what I was suffering for just then was a feather mattress on each side
of me.

Well, me and Jonadab was "it" for quite a spell. Phil had all the fun,
and I guess he enjoyed it. If he'd stopped right then, when the fishing
was good, I cal'late he'd have fetched port with a full hold; but no,
he had to rub it in, so to speak, and that's where he slopped over. You
know how 'tis when you're eating mince-pie--it's the "one more slice"
that fetches the nightmare. Phil stopped to get that slice.

He kept whizzing up and down that river till Jonadab and me kind of got
over our variousness. We could manage to get along without spreading out
like porous plasters, and could set up for a minute or so on a stretch.
And twa'n't necessary for us to hold a special religious service every
time the flat-iron come about. Altogether, we was in that condition
where the doctor might have held out some hopes.

And, in spite of the cold, we was noticing how Phil was sailing that
three-cornered sneak-box--noticing and criticising; at least, I was, and
Cap'n Jonadab, being, as I've said, the best skipper of small craft
from Provincetown to Cohasset Narrows, must have had some ideas on the
subject. Your old chum, Catesby-Stuart, thought he was mast-high
so fur's sailing was concerned, anybody could see that, but he had
something to larn. He wasn't beginning to get out all there was in that
ice-boat. And just then along comes another feller in the same kind of
hooker and gives us a hail. There was two other chaps on the boat with
him.

"Hello, Phil!" he yells, rounding his flat-iron into the wind abreast of
ours and bobbing his night-cap. "I hoped you might be out. Are you game
for a race?"

"Archie," answers our skipper, solemn as a setting hen, "permit me to
introduce to you Cap'n Jonadab Wixon and Admiral Barzilla Wingate, of
Orham, on the Cape."

I wasn't expecting to fly an admiral's pennant quite so quick, but I
managed to shake out through my teeth--they was chattering like a box
of