I DOZED but fitfully, with a fretful sense of sore elbows and neck
and many a draughty hiatus among the blankets. It was broad daylight
before I had reached the stage of torpor in which such slumber
merges. That was finally broken by the descent through the skylight
of a torrent of water. I started up, bumped my head hard against the
decks, and blinked leaden-eyed upwards.

'Sorry! I'm scrubbing decks. Come up and bathe. Slept well?' I heard
a voice saying from aloft.

'Fairly well,' I growled, stepping out into a pool of water on the
oilcloth. Thence I stumbled up the ladder, dived overboard, and
buried bad dreams, stiffness, frowsiness, and tormented nerves in the
loveliest fiord of the lovely Baltic. A short and furious swim and I
was back again, searching for a means of ascent up the smooth black
side, which, low as it was, was slippery and unsympathetic. Davies,
in a loose canvas shirt, with the sleeves tucked up, and flannels
rolled up to the knee, hung over me with a rope's end, and chatted
unconcernedly about the easiness of the job when you know how,
adjuring me to mind the paint, and talking about an accommodation
ladder he had once had, but had thrown overboard because it was so
horribly in the way. When I arrived, my knees and elbows were picked
out in black paint, to his consternation. Nevertheless, as I plied
the towel, I knew that I had left in those limpid depths yet another
crust of discontent and self-conceit.

As I dressed into flannels and blazer, I looked round the deck, and
with an unskilled and doubtful eye took in all that the darkness had
hitherto hidden. She seemed very small (in point of fact she was
seven tons), something over thirty feet in length and nine in beam, a