ght in the murky gray to leeward. And the
great albatrosses veered and circled about us, beating up into the bitter
violence of the gale and sweeping grandly away before it far faster than
it blew.

Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent, questioning
eyes. With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew aside the ear-
flap of her sou'wester and shouted:

"It is nothing new. I have been here before. In the lives of all my
fathers have I been here. The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites my
nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening. I
know, now, that my forbears were Vikings. I was seed of them in their
own day. With them I have raided English coasts, dared the Pillars of
Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high place of
government over the soft sun-warm peoples. I am Hengist and Horsa; I am
of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them. I have bearded and bitten
the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever the ice-ages came to
be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore, slain the mastodon and
the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on the walls of deep-
buried caves--ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side with my brother-
cubs, the scars of whose fangs are now upon me."

She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
cheeks, and the _Elsinore_ flung over and down as if she would never rise
again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying arc.
Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my ear-flap.

"I don't know anything about it," she cried. "It sounds like poetry. But
I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it aforetime,
when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back the frost and
night."

"And the books?" she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.

"They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools that
wrote them," I replied.

Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as she
swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she caught
footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out of my sight
under the perilous overhang of the top.

CHAPTER XXXV

"What price tobacco?" was Mr. Mellaire's greeting, when I came on deck
this morning, bruised and weary, aching in every bone and muscle from
sixty hours of being tossed about.

The wind had fallen to a dea