on to the spar, but I was hungry and thirsty and bruised, so I just took in two holes of my waist-belt, and put up a hymn, and had a look round for what I could see.  Well, I saw more than I cared for.  Within five paces of me there was a great fish, as long pretty nigh as the spar that I was grippin’.  It’s a mighty pleasant thing to have your legs in the water and a beast like that all ready for a nibble at your toes.”

“Mon Dieu!” cried the French soldier.  “And he have not eat you?”

Ephraim Savage’s little eyes twinkled at the reminiscence.

“I ate him,” said he.

“What!” cried Amos.

“It’s a mortal fact.  I’d a jack-knife in my pocket, Same as this one, and I kicked my legs to keep the brute off, and I whittled away at the spar until I’d got a good jagged bit off, sharp at each end, same as a nigger told me once down Delaware way.  Then I waited for him, and stopped kicking, so he came at me like a hawk on a chick-a-dee.  When he turned up his belly I jammed my left hand with the wood right into his great grinnin’ mouth, and I let him have it with my knife between the gills.  He tried to break away then, but I held on, d’ye see, though he took me so deep I thought I’d never come up again.  I was nigh gone when we got to the surface, but he was floatin’ with the white up, and twenty holes in his shirt front.  Then I got back to my spar, for we’d gone a long fifty fathoms under water, and when I reached it I fainted dead away.”

“And then?”

“Well, when I came to, it was calm, and there was the dead shark floatin’ beside me.  I paddled my spar over to him and I got loose a few yards of halliard that were hangin’ from one end of it.  I made a clove-hitch round his tail, d’ye see, and got the end of it slung over the spar and fastened, so as I couldn’t lose him.  Then I set to work and I ate him in a week right up to his back fin, and I drank the rain that fell on my coat, and when I was picked up by the Gracie of Gloucester, I was that fat that I could scarce climb aboard.  That’s what Ephraim Savage means, my lad, when he says that he is a baddish man to beat.”

Whilst the Puritan seaman had been detailing his reminiscence, his eyes had kept wandering from the clouds to the flapping sails and back.  Such wind as there was came in little short puffs, and the canvas either drew full or was absolutely slack.  The fleecy shreds of cloud above, however, travelled swiftly across the blue sky.  It was on these that the captain fixed his gaze, and he watched them like a man who is working out a problem in his mind.  They were abreast of Honfleur now, and about half a mile out from it.  Several sloops and brigs were lying there in a cluster, and a whole fleet of brown-sailed fishing-boats were tacking slowly in.  Yet all was quiet on the curving quay and on the half-moon fort over which floated the white flag with the golden fleur-de-lis.  The port lay on their quarter now and they were drawing away more quickly as the breeze freshened.  De Catinat glancing back had almost made up his mind that their fears were quite groundless when they were brought back in an instant and more urgently than ever.