that accumulate in the course of a voyage, the kedge sent ashore, and the decks tidied down:  a good three-quarters of an hour’s work, during which I raged about the deck like a man with a strong toothache.  The transition from the wild sea to the comparative immobility of the lagoon had wrought strange distress among my nerves:  I could not hold still whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and the irrational screaming of the sea-birds saddened me like a dirge.  It was a relief when, with Nares, and a couple of hands, I might drop into the boat and move off at last for the Flying Scud.

“She looks kind of pitiful, don’t she?” observed the captain, nodding towards the wreck, from which we were separated by some half a mile.  “Looks as if she didn’t like her berth, and Captain Trent had used her badly.  Give her ginger, boys!” he added to the hands, “and you can all have shore liberty to-night to see the birds and paint the town red.”

We all laughed at the pleasantry, and the boat skimmed the faster over the rippling face of the lagoon.  The Flying Scud would have seemed small enough beside the wharves of San Francisco, but she was some thrice the size of the Norah Creina, which had been so long our continent; and as we craned up at her wall-sides, she impressed us with a mountain magnitude.  She lay head to the reef, where the huge blue wall of the rollers was for ever ranging up and crumbling down; and to gain her starboard side, we must pass below the stern.  The rudder was hard aport, and we could read the legend: 

     FLYING SCUD

     HULL

On the other side, about the break of the poop, some half a fathom of rope ladder trailed over the rail, and by this we made our entrance.

She was a roomy ship inside, with a raised poop standing some three feet higher than the deck, and a small forward house, for the men’s bunks and the galley, just abaft the foremast.  There was one boat on the house, and another and larger one, in beds on deck, on either hand of it.  She had been painted white, with tropical economy, outside and in; and we found, later on, that the stanchions of the rail, hoops of the scuttle but, etc., were picked out with green.  At that time, however, when we first stepped aboard, all was hidden under the droppings of innumerable sea-birds.

The birds themselves gyrated and screamed meanwhile among the rigging; and when we looked into the galley, their outrush drove us back.  Savage-looking fowl they were, savagely beaked, and some of the black ones great as eagles.  Half-buried in the slush, we were aware of a litter of kegs in the waist; and these, on being somewhat cleaned, proved to be water beakers and quarter casks of mess beef with some colonial brand, doubtless collected there before the Tempest hove in sight, and while Trent and his men had no better expectation than to strike for Honolulu in the boats.  Nothing else was notable on deck, save where the loose topsail had played some havoc with the rigging, and there hung, and swayed, and sang in the declining wind, a raffle of intorted cordage.