rom her own perplexities.

"Gosh a'mighty!" Uncle Sid was out in the street, peering through the
mist. "Seems like wadin' through skim milk."

"Which way?" Helen paused beside him.

"I snum to Gracious if I know! I didn't adjust my compasses last night,
an' I guess I'll have to sail by dead reckonin'. Every country that ever
I was in before, an' I've been in most of 'em, the water ran down hill.
Now here, what there is of it, don't seem to pay any attention to
grades. When it comes to a hill, it just changes to gas, coagulates on
the other side, an' goes on."

Uncle Sid was under way; Helen, absorbed in thought, followed absently
in his wake. The palms which the industrious boomers had planted along
the streets, loomed hazily through the fog ahead, gradually sharpened in
outline, and again grew hazy with distance, as they passed them by. From
each palm, a tuft of yellow-green spears stood up defiantly above a
cluster of gray spikes pointing downward to their warty trunks; a
picture of hope eternal in spite of inevitable death, as cheerfully
suggestive of mortality, as the upward pointing hands, and the
downward-drooping willows on the tombstones of New England's puritan
dead.

Helen was wondering what possible pleasure there could be in this walk,
but it was new and strange to Uncle Sid and he ploughed steadily ahead.
In spite of the dragging sand that made her feet feel like lead, the
exercise did not stir her blood to a glow of warmth. The physical chill
of the fog, the tawny sand that seemed to tinge the creeping mist, the
mental chill of her mood affected her so that it suddenly seemed to her
as if she could not take another step.

"Aren't you hunting needless trouble, Uncle Sid?" she suddenly cried,
stopping short and looking at Uncle Sid. "Let's go back. We can be no
end more miserable in our awful hotel with only half the trouble."

"I ain't seen no signs of the Christopher Sawyer yet, exceptin' this."
Uncle Sid clove a semicircle through the mist with his outstretched arm.

"Oh, well, if it's a scientific voyage, Uncle Sid, let's go right on."

"Must be that. It's something an' it ain't no pleasure excursion, that's
sure!"

They plodded on. It seemed to Helen as if it were miles, she was certain
it was hours. At last it grew lighter, and the yellow tawn of the sand
appeared to have risen higher and higher, till the whole of the
shrouding mist was a yellow haze.

"I can't go another step, Uncle Sid."