g lazily round and headed
for the open sea. I record the fact, but in truth Davies might have
taken me where he liked, for no land was visible, only a couple of
ghostly booms.

'It seems a pity to miss over that channel,' said Davies with a sigh;
'just when the 'Kormoran' can't watch us.' (We had not seen her at all
this morning.)

I set myself to the lead again, averse to reopening a barren
argument. Grimm had done his work for the present, I felt certain,
and was on his way by the shortest road to Norderney and Memmert.

We were soon outside and heading west, our boom squared away and the
island sand-dunes just apparent under our lee. Then the breeze died
to the merest draught, and left us rolling inert in a long swell.
Consumed with impatience to get on I saw fatality in this failure of
wind, after a fortnight of unprofitable meanderings, when we had
generally had too much of it, and always enough for our purpose. I
tried to read below, but the vile squirting of the centre-board drove
me up.

'Can't we go any faster?' I burst out once. I felt that there ought
to be a pyramid of gauzy canvas aloft, spinnakers, flying jibs, and
what not.

'I don't go in for speed,' said Davies, shortly. He loyally did his
best to 'shove her' along, but puffs and calms were the rule all day,
and it was only by towing in the dinghy for two hours in the
afternoon that we covered the length of Langeoog, and crept before
dark to an anchorage behind Baltrum, its slug-shaped neighbour on the
west. Strictly, I believe, we should have kept the sea all night; but
I had not the grit to suggest that course, and Davies was only too
glad of an excuse for threading the shoals of the Accumer Ee on a
rising tide. The atmosphere had been slowly clearing as the day wore
on; but we had scarcely anchored ten minutes before a blanket of
white fog, rolling in from seaward, swallowed us up. Davies was
already afield in the dinghy, and I had to guide him back with a
foghorn, whose music roused hosts of sea birds from the surrounding
flats, and brought them wheeling and complaining round us, a weird
invisible chorus to my mournful solo.

The fog hung heavy still at daybreak on the 20th, but dispersed
partially under a catspaw from the south about eight o'clock, in time
for us to traverse the boomed channel behind Baltrum, before the tide
left the watershed.

'We shan't get far to-day,' said Davies, with philosophy. 'And this
sort of thing may go on f