ear-flap.

"I don't know anything about it," she cried. "It sounds like poetry.
But I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it
aforetime, when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back
the frost and night."

"And the books?" she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.

"They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools
that wrote them," I replied.

Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as
she swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she
caught footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out
of my sight under the perilous overhang of the top.



CHAPTER XXXV



"What price tobacco?" was Mr. Mellaire's greeting, when I came on
deck this morning, bruised and weary, aching in every bone and muscle
from sixty hours of being tossed about.

The wind had fallen to a dead calm toward morning, and the Elsinore,
her several spread sails booming and slatting, rolled more miserably
than ever. Mr. Mellaire pointed for'ard of our starboard beam. I