ike brutal!" Jim was always ready to oblige, and I did my
best to win over my enemies by trying to show that I did not mind how
they treated me, and I soon succeeded.

We were, I should have said, bound out to Bergen, on the coast of
Norway, for a cargo of hides, tallow, salt fish, and spars, which we
were to carry to London. The weather had hitherto been fine, a great
advantage to Jim and me, as we had time to learn our duties and to get
accustomed to going aloft before our nerves and muscles were put to any
severe test.

But though the sea was smooth, the breeze, which had at first carried us
briskly along, shifted to the northward, so that we made but slow
progress. Now we stood on one tack, now on the other, the wind each
time heading us. At last the grumblers began to declare that we should
never make our port.

"The old craft has got a run of ill-luck, there's something worse
a-going to happen," said Sam Norris, one of my chief persecutors, as
during his watch below he sat with his arms folded on his chest in the
fore-peak. "I seed a black cat come aboard the night afore we left the
docks, and no one knows that she ever went ashore again."

Some of the men looked uncomfortable at Sam's statement, but others
laughed.

"What harm could the black cat do, if she did come aboard?" I inquired.
"Probably she came to look for rats, and having killed all she could
find, slipped ashore again unseen by any one."

"I didn't say a she-cat. It looked like a big tom-cat; but who knows
that it was really a cat at all?" said Sam.

"If it wasn't a tom-cat, what was it?" asked Bob Stout, a chum of Sam's.

"Just what neither you nor I would like to meet if we had to go down
into the hold alone," said Sam, in a mysterious tone.

Just then the watch below was summoned on deck to shorten sail. Not a
bit too soon either, and we were quickly swarming aloft and out on the
yards.

To reef sails in smooth water is easy enough, but when the ship is
pitching into the fast-rising seas and heeling over to the gale, with
the wind whistling through the rigging, blocks rattling, ropes lashing
about, the hard canvas trying to escape from one's grip, and blatters of
rain and sleet and hail in one's face, it is no pleasant matter. We had
taken two reefs in the topsails, and even then the brig had as much
canvas on her as she could stand up to, and we had all come down on
deck, with the exception of Jim, who had been on the foreyar