seven hundred and eighty. And we have till Wednesday morning. Well, we ought to do it."

"You'll be in time to save them, then!" the elder boy cried, jumping up once more like a Jack-in-the-box. "You'll be in time to save them!"

"Will you be quiet, if you please?" I said, poking him down again flat, and holding my hand on his mouth. "O, yes! I expect we'll be in time to save them. If only you'll let us alone, and not make such a noise. We can do nine knots an hour easy, under all steam; and that ought to bring us up to Tanaki, as you call it, by Wednesday morning in the very small hours. Let's see, we've got four clear days to do it in."

"Five," the boy answered. "Five. To-day's Friday."

"No, no," I replied curtly. "Will you please shut up? Especially when you only darken counsel with many words. You're out of your reckoning. To-day's Saturday, I tell you."

And in point of fact, indeed, it really was Saturday.

"No, it's Friday," Martin went on with extraordinary persistence.

"Saturday," I repeated. "Knife; scissors: knife; scissors."

"But we got away from Tanaki eight days ago," the boy declared strongly with a very earnest face; "and it was Thursday when we left. I kept count of the days and nights all that awful time we were tossing about on the ocean alone, and I'm sure I'm right. To-day's Friday."

"Jim," I said, turning to my brother, "what day of the week do you make it?"

"Why, Saturday, of course," Jim answered with confidence.

I went to the bottom of the companion-ladder and called out aloud where the boy could hear me, "Tom Blake, what day of the week and month is it?"

"Saturday the sixth, sir," Tom called out.

"There, my boy," I said, turning to him, "you see you're mistaken. You've lost count of the time in this awful journey of yours. I expect you were half unconscious the last day and night. But, good heavens, Jim, just to think of what they've done! They've been out nine days and nights in an open boat, almost without food or drink, and they've come all that incredible distance before the high wind. Except with a ripping good breeze behind them they could never have done it."

"For my part," said Jim, looking up from his chart, "I can hardly understand how they ever did it at all. I declare, I call it nothing short of a miracle!"

And so indeed it was: for it seemed as though the wind had drifted them straight ahead from the moment they started in the exact direction where the Albatross was to meet them.

I'm an old seafaring hand by this time, and I may be superstitious, but I see the finger of fate in such a coincidence as that one.

CHAPTER IV.

MARTIN LUTHER'S STORY.

For the next two days we went steaming ahead as hard as we could go in a bee-line to the northeastward, in the direction of the Duke of Cumberland's Islands; and it was two days clear before those unfortunate boys, Jack and Martin—for that was what they called one another for short, in spite of their severely theological second names—were in a condition to tell us exactly what had happened, without danger to their shattered nerves and impaired digestions.

When they did manage to speak—both at once, for choice, in their eagerness to get their story out—here's about what their history came to, as we pieced it together, bit by bit, from the things they told us at different times. If I were one of those writing chaps, now, that know how to tell a whole ten years' history, end on end, exactly as it happened, without missing a detail, I'd get it all out for you just as Martin told us; or better still, I'd give it to you in a single connected piece, between inverted commas, as his own words, beginning, "I was born," said he, "in the city of Edinburgh," and so forth, after the regular high-and-dry literary fashion. But how on earth those clever book-making fellows can ever remember a whole long speech, word for word, from beginning to end, I never could make out and never shall, neither. What memories they must have to do it, to be sure! It's my own belief they make it up more than half out of their own heads as they go along, and are perfectly happy if it only just sounds plausible. But anyhow, Martin Luther Macglashin didn't tell us all his story at a single time, or in a connected way; he gave us a bit now and a bit again, with additions from Jack, according as he was able. So being, as I say, no more than a free-and-easy master mariner myself, without skill in literature, I'm not going to try to repeat it all, word for word, to you precisely as it came, but shall just take the liberty of spinning my yarn my own way and letting you have in short the gist and substance of what we gradually got out of our two fugitives.

Well, it seems that Jack and Martin's father was, just as I suspected, a Scotch missionary on the Island of Tanaki. He lived there with another family of missionaries of the same sect, in peace and quiet, as well as with an English merchant of the name of Williams, who traded with the natives for calico, knives, glass beads and tobacco. For a long time things had gone on pretty comfortably in the little settlement; though to be sure the natives did sometimes steal Mr. Macglashin's fowls or threaten to tie Mr. Williams to a cocoa-nut palm and take cock-shots at him with a Snider, out of pure lightness of heart, unless he gave them rum, square gin or brandy. Still, in spite of these playful little eccentricities of the good-humored Kanakas, who will have their joke, murder or no murder, all went as merrily as a wedding bell (as they say in novels) till suddenly one morning a French labor-vessel—I suspect the very one we had intercepted in the act of trying to carry off Nassaline—put into the harbor in search of "apprentices."

She was a very bad lot, from what the boys told us; a genuine slaver of the worst type; and she stirred up a deal of mischief at Makilolo.