ship. After two hours of futile, light-headed, inconsequent
thinking upon all things under heaven in that dark, dank, wet and
devastated cabin, I arose suddenly and staggered up on deck. The
autocrat of the North Atlantic was still oppressing his kingdom and
its outlying dependencies, even as far as the Bay of Biscay, in the
dismal secrecy of thick, very thick, weather. The force of the
wind, though we were running before it at the rate of some ten
knots an hour, was so great that it drove me with a steady push to
the front of the poop, where my commander was holding on.

"What do you think of it?" he addressed me in an interrogative
yell.

What I really thought was that we both had had just about enough of
it. The manner in which the great West Wind chooses at times to
administer his possessions does not commend itself to a person of
peaceful and law-abiding disposition, inclined to draw distinctions
between right and wrong in the face of natural forces, whose
standard, naturally, is that of might alone. But, of course, I
said nothing. For a man caught, as it were, between his skipper
and the great West Wind silence is the safest sort of diplomacy.
Moreover, I knew my skipper. He did not want to know what I
thought. Shipmasters hanging on a breath before the thrones of the
winds ruling the seas have their psychology, whose workings are as
important to the ship and those on board of her as the changing
moods of the weather. The man, as a matter of fact, under no
circumstances, ever cared a brass farthing for what I or anybody
else in his ship thought. He had had just about enough of it, I
guessed, and what he was at really was a process of fishing for a
suggestion. It was the pride of his life that he had never wasted