ou can try, but you won't get it. You see, Sartoris is in the
same streak--no sooner does he get wrecked than he is shut up aboard
this fever-ship. And s'far as I can see, he'll get on no better till
he's out o' his streak too. You be careful how you go about for the
next six months or so, for as sure as you're born, if you put yourself
in the way of it, you'll have some worse misfortune than any you've yet
met with. Luck's like the tide--you can do nothing agin it; but when it
turns, you've got everything in your favour. Wait till the tide of your
luck turns, young man, before you attempt anything rash. That's my
advice, and I've seen proof of it in every quarter of the globe."

"Father is full of all sorts of sailor-superstitions. He hates to take a
ship out of port on a Friday, and wouldn't kill an albatross for
anything."

"We caught three on the voyage out," said Scarlett; "a Wandering
Albatross, after sighting the Cape of Good Hope, and two sooty ones near
the Campbell Islands. I kept the wing-bones, and would have given you
one for a pipe-stem, Captain, if the ship had reached port."

"But she didn't, my lad," growled the Pilot, "and that's where the point
comes in. Why sailors can't leave them birds alone astonishes me: they
don't hurt nobody, and they don't molest the ship, but sail along out of
pure love o' company. On the strength o' that you must kill 'em, just
for a few feathers and stems for tobacco-pipes. And you got wrecked.
P'r'aps you'll leave 'em alone next voyage."

During the last part of the conversation, Rose had risen, and entered
the house. She now returned with a small leather case in her hand.

"This, at any rate, will be proof against bad luck," she said, as she
undid the case, and drew out a prismatic compass. She adjusted the
eye-piece, in which was a slit and a glass prism and lifted the
sight-vane, down the centre of which a horsehair stretched
perpendicularly to the card of the compass. Putting the instrument to
her eye, Rose took the bearing of one of the twin forest-clad heights,
and said, "Eighty degrees East--is that right?"

"You've got the magnetic bearing," said Scarlett, taking the instrument
from the girl's hand. "To find the real bearing, you must allow for the
variation between the magnetic and true North."

"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed; "that's too dreadfully technical. But take
the compass: it should keep you from being lost in the bush, anyway."

"Thank you," said Jack