o a blue spark, burnt his fingers and vanished. Perhaps
something had gone wrong with the thing!

There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned that
way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other
instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be
gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the
indifference of matter. There was no room for doubt now. Captain
MacWhirr pshawed at it, and threw the match down.

The worst was to come, then--and if the books were right this worst
would be very bad. The experience of the last six hours had enlarged his
conception of what heavy weather could be like. "It'll be terrific," he
pronounced, mentally. He had not consciously looked at anything by the
light of the matches except at the barometer; and yet somehow he had
seen that his water-bottle and the two tumblers had been flung out of
their stand. It seemed to give him a more intimate knowledge of the
tossing the ship had gone through. "I wouldn't have believed it," he
thought. And his table had been cleared, too; his rulers, his pencils,
the inkstand--all the things that had their safe appointed places--they
were gone, as if a mischievous hand had plucked them out one by one
and flung them on the wet floor. The hurricane had broken in upon the
orderly arrangements of his privacy. This had never happened before, and
the feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his composure. And the
worst was to come yet! He was glad the trouble in the 'tween-deck had
been discovered in time. If the ship had to go after all, then, at
least, she wouldn't be going to the bottom with a lot of people in
her fighting teeth and claw. That would have been odious. And in that
feeling there was a humane intention and a vague sense of the fitness of
things.

These instantaneous thoughts were yet in their essence heavy and slow,
partaking of the nature of the man. He extended his hand to put back the
matchbox in its corner of the shelf. There were always matches there--by
his order. The steward had his instructions impressed upon him long
before. "A box . . . just there, see? Not so very full . . . where I can
put my hand on it, steward. Might want a light in a hurry. Can't tell on
board ship what you might want in a hurry. Mind, now."

And of course on his side he would be careful to put it back in its
place scrupulously. He did so now, but before he removed his hand it
occurred to hi