Elsinore, one moment overtoppling her slender frailness, the next
moment splashing a hundred tons of water on her deck and flinging her
skyward as they passed beneath and foamed and crested from sight in
the murky gray to leeward. And the great albatrosses veered and
circled about us, beating up into the bitter violence of the gale and
sweeping grandly away before it far faster than it blew.

Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent,
questioning eyes. With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew
aside the ear-flap of her sou'wester and shouted:

"It is nothing new. I have been here before. In the lives of all my
fathers have I been here. The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites
my nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening.
I know, now, that my forbears were Vikings. I was seed of them in
their own day. With them I have raided English coasts, dared the
Pillars of Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high
place of government over the soft sun-warm peoples. I am Hengist and
Horsa; I am of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them. I have
bearded and bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever
the ice-ages came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer
gore, slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of
my prowess on the walls of deep-buried caves--ay, and suckled she-
wolves side by side with my brother-cubs, the scars of whose fangs
are now upon me."

She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
cheeks, and the Elsinore flung over and down as if she would never
rise again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying
arc. Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my