And my mother, as she says this, puts her apron over her head and
began to cry again. I'd more than half a mind to give way; but you
know what young chaps are. The thought of what the girls of the place
would say about my being afraid to go was too much for me.

At last, when mother saw I was bent on going, she got up and said:

"Well, Will, if my prayers can't keep you back, will you do something
else I ask you?"

"I will, mother," said I--"anything but stay back."

She went off without a word into her bedroom, and she came back with
something in her arms.

"Look here, Will, I made this for your father, and he wouldn't have
it; now I ask you to take it, and put it on if a storm comes on. You
see, you can put it on under your dreadnaught coat, and no one will
be any the wiser."

The thing she brought in was two flat Dutch spirit-bottles, sewn
between two pieces of canvas. It had got strings sewed on for tying
round the body, and put on as she did to show me how, one bottle each
side of the chest, it lay pretty flat.

"Now, Will, these bottles will keep you up for hours. A gentleman who
was staying in the village before you was born was talking about
wrecks, and he said that a couple of empty bottles, well corked, would
keep up a fair swimmer for hours. So I made it; but no words could get
your father to try it, though he was willing enough to say that it
would probably keep him afloat. You'll try it, won't you, Will?"

I didn't much like taking it, but I thought there wasn't much chance
of a storm, and that if I put it under my coat and hid it away down in
the forecastle, no one would see it; and so to please her I said I'd
take it, and that if a bad storm came on I would slip it on.

"I will put a wineglass of brandy into one of the bottles," mother
said. "It may be useful to you; who can say?"

I got the life-preserver, as you call it nowadays, on board without
its being seen, and stowed it away in my locker. I felt glad now I'd
got it, for mother's dream had made me feel uneasy; and on my way down
old Dick Tremaine said to me:

"I don't like the look of the sky, lad."

"No!" says I; "why, it looks fine enough."

"Too fine, lad. I tell ye, boy, I don't like the look of it. I think
we're going to have a bad blow."

I told the others what he had said; but they didn't heed much. Two
boats had come in that morning with a fine catch, and after the bad
time we'd been having it would have taken a lot to keep