got my face into it.
I reflected that sea-sickness was kitten's play to a good bout of
malaria.

The weather was growing worse, and I was getting more than spindrift
from the seas. I hooked my arm round the rope, for my fingers were
numbing. Then I fell to dreaming again, principally about Fosse Manor
and Mary Lamington. This so ravished me that I was as good as asleep. I
was trying to reconstruct the picture as I had last seen her at
Biggleswick station ...

A heavy body collided with me and shook my arm from the rope. I
slithered across the yard of deck, engulfed in a whirl of water. One
foot caught a stanchion of the rail, and it gave with me, so that for
an instant I was more than half overboard. But my fingers clawed wildly
and caught in the links of what must have been the anchor chain. They
held, though a ton's weight seemed to be tugging at my feet ... Then
the old tub rolled back, the waters slipped off, and I was sprawling on
a wet deck with no breath in me and a gallon of brine in my windpipe.

I heard a voice cry out sharply, and a hand helped me to my feet. It
was Gresson, and he seemed excited.

'God, Mr Brand, that was a close call! I was coming up to find you,
when this damned ship took to lying on her side. I guess I must have
cannoned into you, and I was calling myself bad names when I saw you
rolling into the Atlantic. If I hadn't got a grip on the rope I would
have been down beside you. Say, you're not hurt? I reckon you'd better
come below and get a glass of rum under your belt. You're about as wet
as mother's dish-clouts.'

There's one advantage about campaigning. You take your luck when it
comes and don't worry about what might have been. I didn't think any
more of the business, except that it had cured me of wanting to be
sea-sick. I went down to the reeking cabin without one qualm in my
stomach, and ate a good meal of welsh-rabbit and bottled Bass, with a
tot of rum to follow up with. Then I shed my wet garments, and slept in
my bunk till we anchored off a village in Mull in a clear blue morning.

It took us four days to crawl up that coast and make Oban, for we
seemed to be a floating general store for every hamlet in those parts.
Gresson made himself very pleasant, as if he wanted to atone for nearly
doing me in. We played some poker, and I read the little books I had
got in Colonsay, and then rigged up a fishing-line, and caught saithe
and lythe and an occasional big haddock. But I fo