It was dangerous to ridicule anybody in that gale, for the doctor in the companion-way was leaning in at my window and laughing in his big English voice, when the Hela lurched and pitched him half-way into my state-room.  There he balanced with his hands on my trunk.

He was rather a tight fit, which interested Jimmie more than young Bashforth, so he left the boy and came around and pried the doctor back into the companion-way.

The Hela was a fickle jade, for no sooner would she shake us up in such an alarming manner than she would seem to regret her violence, and would skim like a bird for an hour or so, with no perceptible motion.  She would not even flap her big white wings, but she cut through the water with a whir and a rush which exhilarated me as flying must stir the heart of a sea-gull.

She behaved so well after five o’clock that they decided to try to eat dinner from the dinner-table—­a thing they had not done since we started.  There were only four of them able to appear—­Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie, the doctor, and the Commodore.

They put the racks up and took every precaution.  The only mistake they made was in using the yacht’s lovely china, which bore the Strossi crest under the Hela’s private flag.

Jimmie and his wife sat opposite each other.  I put three pillows under my head, the better to watch them, when suddenly the yacht tilted Mrs. Jimmie and her chair over backward.  Jimmie saw her going and reached to save her.  But he forgot to set down his soup-plate.  The result was that she got Jimmie’s soup in her face, and that he slid clear across the table on his hands and knees, taking china and table-cloth with him, and they all landed on top of poor Mrs. Jimmie (who, even as I write, is in her stateroom having her hair washed).

Her chief wail, when she could speak, was not that her head ached from the blow, or that she was half strangled with tepid soup, but that Jimmie had broken all the china.  She could not be comforted until the Commodore proved that some of the china had been broken previously, by showing her the fragments wrecked on the first day out.

That last catastrophe has apparently settled things.  Everybody has turned in to repair damages, and, perhaps, afterwards to sleep.

The Commodore is studying the charts on the dining-room table, and the captain, an American, has just put his head in at the door and said: 

“She’s sailing twelve knots an hour under just the fores’l, sir, and she’s running like a scairt dog.”

* * * * *

Americans are so accustomed to outrageous distances that a journey of fifty hours is mere play.  But I sincerely believe that no other trait of ours causes the European to regard our nation with such suspicion as our utter unconcern of long journeys.  Nothing short of accession to a title or to escape being caught by the police would induce the Continental to travel over a few hours.  So when I decided to go to Poland in order to be a member of a gorgeous house-party, I might as well have robbed a bank and given my friends something to be suspicious of.  They never believed that I would do such a fatiguing and unheard-of thing until I really left.