"You had a pretty time getting a way on her," Jeremy Ammidon remarked.

"I did," Gerrit acknowledged shortly. "The second mate's ear was taken
loose by a belaying pin that flew out of the dark like a gull. Mr.
Broadrick had a bad minute in the port forecastle after he had ordered
all hands on deck a third time. The fine weather left us, though, and
that kept the crew busy; we carried away the fore-royal mast and yard
before we were within a thousand miles of the latitude of the Horn. That
hit us like a cannon ball of ice. You know what it is at its worst," he
told his father; "weeks of snow and hail and fog and gales; and not for
anything can you keep an easting. God knows how a ship lives through the
seas; but she does, she does, and you lose the Magellan clouds astern."

The old man nodded.

Gerrit was relieved, however, when supper ended and his wife formally
departed for her room. Immediately slipping a hand inside Rhoda's arm he
conducted her to the drawing-room. "I'd like you to know more about it,"
he said directly.

"It was very extraordinary. A Lu Kikwang was a high official of the
Canton Customs, and when Shanghai was declared an open port in forty-two
they made him hoppo there. I remembered him at Canton, a dignified old
duck with eighty or a hundred servants to keep anyone from possibly
speaking to him of business, but there had been some trouble about
foreign vessels selling saltpeter illegally and--he knew some English--we
had quite a friendly little consultation. Yet it hadn't prepared me for
his coming off to the _Nautilus_ at Shanghai with a linguist and an air
of the greatest mystery. His manner was beautiful, of course, absolutely
tranquil and that made what they said, what he hoped, seem even wilder