Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead
calm and sickly swell. Miss West says the barometer is down, but
that the warning has been too long, for the Plate, to amount to
anything. Pamperos happen quickly here, and though the Elsinore,
under bare poles to her upper-topsails, is prepared for anything, it
may well be that they will be crowding on canvas in another hour.

Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails,
and the gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai
came on deck, strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then
spoke in an undertone to Mr. Pike. Mr. Pike did not like it. To me,
a tyro, it was evident that he disagreed with his master.
Nevertheless, his voice went out in a snarl aloft to the men on the
royal-yards to make all fast again. Then it was clewlines and
buntlines and lowering of yards as the topgallant-sails were stripped
off. The crojack was taken in, and some of the outer fore-and-aft
handsails, whose order of names I can never remember.

A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear
sky. I could see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased. The Samurai
had been mistaken. And each time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked
topgallant- and royal-yards, I knew his thought was that they might
well be carrying sail. I was quite convinced that the Plate had
fooled Captain West. So was Miss West convinced, and, being a
favoured person like myself, she frankly told me so.

"Father will be setting sail in half an hour," she prophesied.