before dark, was responsible for sending them down by the run. The runs to noon of the 5th and 6th, respectively, were sixty-three and ninety miles, in a course that approximated W.S.W.

Fair weather and light breezes were taken advantage of on the morning of the 7th to install a much-needed safety device in the form of a wire rail run all the way round the yacht at a height of eighteen inches above the main rail, a precaution the imperative necessity of which had been shown when one of the sailors had been thrown overboard during the storm. The yacht's rail, only two feet in height, while of some protection at the bows and stern, was almost useless amidships, where the deckhouse, separated from it by only a narrow passage, rose to an equal height. Three-quarter inch steel stanchions were set at intervals of eight feet along the rail, and through these a quarter-inch wire cable was run. The stanchions were fastened by a bolt on the under side of the rail in such a manner as to be easily removed, thus permitting the whole affair to be expeditiously taken down and stowed while in port. This simple and inexpensive precaution proved of incalculable value in insuring the safety of the decks on stormy nights, a usefulness which was put to the test many times in the course of the months that followed.

Clearing skies and a smoothing sea on the third day out brought the Mater and Claribel—two pathetic bundles of rugs—up on deck, where the sun and fresh air began the slow task of reviving in them an interest in life. All day they drooped in hollow-eyed wretchedness with their white faces turned toward the paradise of a terra firma beyond the eastern horizon which every moment was receding farther away. Through all of the bright noontide and the sparkling afternoon they kept their ceaseless vigil, and even when twilight came, with a freshening wind and heavier seas, they still refused to go below. Day and night were all the same to them now, they said. An hour later a black-visaged squall came boring down out of the night ahead, and the raindrops and the driving spray began to drum a duet to the accompaniment of the rising blasts of the wind.

"You'll be shivering with cold before long if you stay here," admonished the Commodore gently; "best get up and go below now."

"There is no heat or cold any more," one muttered listlessly, and they both drew their rugs closer and curled the tighter into the curve of the transoms.

A high-headed maverick of a comber came crashing over the weather rail and swept the muffled figures into a vortex of spinning foam where a ton of green water washed about the cockpit. We sprang to help them, but they only shuddered resignedly back into the wash of the clearing scuppers and disdained to move.

"You're both soaking wet," protested the Commodore; "please go below now and get into some dry clothes."

"There is no wet nor dry any more," bubbled the starboard bundle; "let us alone."

"A wave like that last one has been known to kill a strong man," ventured the Commodore weakly, at his wit's end for an argument that would have some effect. "Here's another coming now. Please—"

"There is no life nor death any more," broke in a sputter from the port bundle; "and even if there was we wouldn't—"

We picked up the two dripping bundles and bore them gently below just as a second comber, running wildly amuck, banged its head off against the rail and turned the cockpit into another maelstrom.

Save for shortening periods of introspective languor induced by whiffs from the galley or the clink of dishes, matters were better the next day, and the day following the sufferers were sufficiently revived to begin unpacking and—as they called it—"putting things trig and shipshape below." After that things began falling into the even routine which, save for its occasional disturbance in stormy weather, characterized our life at sea to the end of the voyage. But there never came a time when, for the Mater and Claribel, the first three or four days out of port did not hold the menace of that chaotic state in which there was no night or day, heat or cold, wetness or dryness, and in which if there was to have been a choosing between life and death the latter would have been the less bitter portion. A Pacific yachting cruise is not all an idyllic pleasaunce to the mal-de-mer subject, for the ocean which has not been pacific for many hours at a time since the day it was discovered and christened does not temper its moods for the small craft.

Lurline in drydock before sailing

"The Commodore laboriously squinted out his first

"Full-and-by"

sights"

In spite of restricted quarters, the days which followed seemed never long enough to do all we laid out for them. The Commodore was the busiest of us. To him it became evident before we were fairly out of sight of land that his pleasure cruise was going to have to be enjoyed to the accompaniment of a lot of hard work, for Lurline's former sailing master—whom he had shipped as mate and whom he subsequently let go in Honolulu—was absolutely incompetent as a navigator and only fairly so in the actual sailing of the yacht. This came as a very disconcerting surprise, for the man had been well recommended, and his incompetence meant that all of the work—to say nothing of the responsibility—of navigating the yacht through some of the stormiest and worst charted latitudes of the Seven Seas was to be thrown on the Commodore, whose deep-sea sailoring had been confined to a voyage around the Horn on a clipper when he was in his teens.

I have still a vivid mind picture of the Commodore when, after he had laboriously squinted out his first sights and was ready to try to figure the position of the yacht, he disappeared into his cabin behind an armful of tables and books on navigation and slammed and locked the door. The iterated luncheon call elicited only a grunt of impatience from the depths of the sanctum, and likewise the summons to tea and dinner. The Mater's timid knocking at bedtime brought no answer at all, and we were gathered in perplexed colloquy on deck as to what the next move would be, when a booming "Got it!" thundered out from the locked cabin, and a moment later the door was burst open by a pajama-clad figure, waving a slip of paper above its towel-bound head.

"Observation checks Dead-reckoning at last," cried the Commodore. "Give me some dinner."

Between mouthfuls he explained to us that the first time he worked out the sights they showed the yacht to be somewhere in Tibet. All the rest of the morning she kept turning up in various parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe, the only time she was in the water being after a reckoning which gave the latitude and longitude of Victoria Nyanza. Shortly after noon the figuring in of some allowances hitherto neglected jumped the elusive craft into the Western Hemisphere, but as near as might be to a perch on the summit of Aconcagua. Tea time had her in the Klondike, and several other Canadian points were visited before Nebraska was reached at the call for dinner. An hour later she was actually in the Pacific, but