rt until you had all safely crossed the bar and
disappeared behind the sand spit; and then I set the hands to work upon
various small jobs; after which I went round the ship and satisfied
myself that everything was perfectly safe and snug on deck and below.
Then, feeling tolerably certain that you would not return until to-day
at the earliest, and that consequently it would be necessary for me to
be up and about during the greater part of the coming night, I went
below and turned in all standing, to get as much sleep as possible,
leaving the boatswain's mate in charge of the deck, together with
midshipmen Keene and Parkinson.

"The day passed quite uneventfully; everything went perfectly smoothly;
the ship rode easily to her anchors; and there had been nothing to
report. But about two bells in the first dog-watch I noticed that the
sky was beginning to look a bit windy away down in the western quarter--
nothing to speak of, you understand, or to cause any uneasiness; but it
made me take a look at the barometer, and I saw that it had dropped a
trifle since eight bells; and at the same time the wind was distinctly
freshening and the swell gathering weight. All this, of course, meant
more wind within the next few hours; I therefore kept a sharp eye on the
barometer; and when at four bells I found it still dropping I decided to
let go the two stream anchors, as a precautionary measure, while we had
light enough to see what we were doing; and this I did, at the same time
paying out an extra fifty fathoms on each cable, after which I felt that
we were perfectly safe in the face of anything short of a hurricane."

The new skipper nodded his approval, but said nothing; and Purchase
proceeded with his story.

"Well, as you probably noticed, shortly after sunset the wind breezed up
quite strongly; but I was not in the least uneasy, for the barometer had
ceased to drop before eight bells, and, although the sky was overcast
and the night very dark, there was nothing threatening in the look of
the weather, and it was only occasionally that we really tautened out
our cables. Still, I made up my mind to remain on deck all night,
having had a good spell of sleep during the day.

"As the night wore on and the wind held fresh but steady, I felt that
after all I really need not have let go the streams, for the bowers
alone would have held us quite easily against six times as much wind and
sea as we had; you may therefore perhaps be