ting the helmsman.
Then, as the schooner came to her new course, "How's that, Mr Temple?"

"Excellent, sir," I replied; "we shall just nicely clear the northern
end of the reef if she is kept at that."

"D'ye see anything else besides the reef, Mr Temple?" asked the
skipper,--"anything, I mean, in the shape of another schooner, for
instance?"

"Nothing at all, sir," I answered.

"That's all right, then," answered the skipper in a tone of exuberant
satisfaction. "I guess you don't need to stay up there no longer, do
ye?"

I slung the telescope round my neck by its strap, and then, swinging off
the yard, slid down to the deck hand over hand by way of the topgallant
backstay, walking aft and joining the skipper and Cunningham as soon as
my feet touched the planks.

"So the reefs there, all right, is it?" remarked Brown, as I joined the
pair and returned the telescope with thanks to its lawful owner. "There
ain't no chance of a mistake, I s'pose?"

"No chance at all," I replied confidently. "It is there as plain as the
nose on one's face. If you remember, I told you yesterday that,
provided the breeze held, we should be at anchor in the lagoon by noon
to-day; and so we shall."

"Ay, ay," answered Brown. "I remember your sayin' so. And I didn't
doubt your word, not for a second, for you're an A1 navigator, and no
mistake. Never knowed a better. But I was just a little bit afeard
that Abe might ha' been playin' it on me, or else that his riggers might
ha' got a bit mixed. But I reckon it's a square deal, since you say
that the reefs there. What do it look like?"

"From aloft it presents the precise appearance that you described to
me," I said. "A bare reef, almost awash, with not a thing upon it,
except a few birds which I could just make out circling in the air above
it."

"Ay, that'll be it, sure enough," agreed Brown. "I remember Abe
speakin' about them birds. Their eggs, some clams that he knocked off
the rocks, and a fish or two that he managed to catch later on was all
that the pore feller had to eat for five everlastin' months--and raw at
that."

It was just five bells when we weathered the northern extremity of the
reef and bore away to look for the entrance to the lagoon. I was then
aloft again, for the sake of the more extended view obtainable from the
height of the topgallant yard; and as we swept past the reef, and I
looked down upon it, I thought I had never seen a more ghastly place