spread before them, and so busy were they despatching the sailor's
cooking, that it was not till after they concluded the meal and
Bluewater Bill had his old brier pipe going that they came down to the
discussion of what each of the boys had uppermost in his mind--namely,
the history of Bluewater Bill's discovery of the lost treasure galleon
of the Sargasso Sea.

As for Bluewater Bill he was delighted to spin his yarn to such
sympathetic listeners and told it with so much embroidery and
discursive oratory that to repeat it in his words would be tedious. We
shall therefore condense it as follows:

Bluewater Bill had been mate on the Bath, Me., barque, Eleanor Jones.
They were bound for South America with a cargo of chemicals and
assorted canned stuffs. From the first day out misfortune assailed the
vessel. She encountered heavy weather and, during a towering climax of
the storm, part of her deck load of American lumber fetched away and
carried with it three of her crew of ten men. Shortly after that the
cook's big copper boiler ripped loose and fell on him, scalding him so
badly that when the ship finally emerged from her storm-battering he
died and was buried at sea.

The captain of the craft, however, was what Bluewater Bill termed "a
masterful man." Despite the urgent entreaties of his depleted crew to
put into some port and refit, he kept on, with favoring breezes, and
soon entered what are called the "doldrums" in which fierce hurricanes
alternate with periods of dead flat calm in which a ship will float on
a rippleless sea "as idle as a painted craft upon a painted ocean."
The Eleanor Jones drifted about in one of these flat, hopeless calms
till the pitch boiled in her seams and the sails seemed dried to