he has discovered a
new reason for hating me. It took me no little while to puzzle it out,
but I finally discovered that it was because I was more luckily born than
he--"gentleman born," he put it.

"And still no more dead men," I twitted Louis, when Smoke and Henderson,
side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first exercise on
deck.

Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head
portentously. "She's a-comin', I tell you, and it'll be sheets and
halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl. I've had the feel
iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly as I feel the
rigging iv a dark night. She's close, she's close."

"Who goes first?" I queried.

"Not fat old Louis, I promise you," he laughed. "For 'tis in the bones
iv me I know that come this time next year I'll be gazin' in the old
mother's eyes, weary with watchin' iv the sea for the five sons she gave
to it."

"Wot's 'e been s'yin' to yer?" Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment later.

"That he's going home some day to see his mother," I answered
diplomatically.

"I never 'ad none," was the Cockney's comment, as he gazed with
lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.

CHAPTER XIV

It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation upon
womankind. For that matter, though not amative to any considerable
degree so far as I have discovered, I was never outside the atmosphere of
women until now. My mother and sisters were always about me, and I was
always trying to escape them; for they worried me to distraction with
their solicitude for my health and with their periodic inroads on my den,
when my orderly confusion, upon which I prided myself, was turned into
worse confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough to the eye.
I never could find anything when they had departed. But now, alas, how
welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-frou and
swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially detested! I am
sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be irritable with them
again. They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust
and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall
only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed
of a mother and some several sisters.

All of which has set me wondering. Where are the mothers of these twenty
and odd men on the _Ghost_? It strikes me as unnatural and u