big
English voice, when the _Hela_ lurched and pitched him half-way into
my state-room. There he balanced with his hands on my trunk.

He was rather a tight fit, which interested Jimmie more than young
Bashforth, so he left the boy and came around and pried the doctor
back into the companion-way.

The _Hela_ was a fickle jade, for no sooner would she shake us up in
such an alarming manner than she would seem to regret her violence,
and would skim like a bird for an hour or so, with no perceptible
motion. She would not even flap her big white wings, but she cut
through the water with a whir and a rush which exhilarated me as
flying must stir the heart of a sea-gull.

She behaved so well after five o'clock that they decided to try to eat
dinner from the dinner-table--a thing they had not done since we
started. There were only four of them able to appear--Mr. and Mrs.
Jimmie, the doctor, and the Commodore.

They put the racks up and took every precaution. The only mistake they
made was in using the yacht's lovely china, which bore the Strossi
crest under the _Hela's_ private flag.

Jimmie and his wife sat opposite each other. I put three pillows under
my head, the better to watch them, when suddenly the yacht tilted Mrs.
Jimmie and her chair over backward. Jimmie saw her going and reached
to save her. But he forgot to set down his soup-plate. The result was
that she got Jimmie's soup in her face, and that he slid clear across
the table on his hands and knees, taking china and table-cloth with
him, and they all landed on top of poor Mrs. Jimmie (who, even as I
write, is in her stateroom having her hair washed).

Her chief wail, when she could speak, was not that her head ached from
the blow, or that she was half strangled with tepid soup, but that
Jimmie had broken all the china. She could not be comforted until the
Commodore proved that some of the china had been broken previously, by
showing her the fragments wrecked on the first day out.

That last catastrophe has apparently settled things. Everybody has
turned in to repair damages, and, perhaps, afterwards to sleep.

The Commodore is studying the charts on the dining-room table, and the
captain, an American, has just put his head in at the door and said:

"She's sailing twelve knots an hour under just the fores'l, sir, and
she's running like a scairt dog."

* * * * *

Americans are so accustomed to outrageous distances that a