This was not a cheerful story, but it was soon driven out of our heads by others.  Fog was the prevailing topic; yarns of the fogs of the northern seas being varied by “red fogs” off the Cape de Verd Islands; and not the least dismal of the narratives was told by Alister Auchterlay, of a fog on Ben Nevis, in which his own grandmother’s uncle perished, chiefly, as it appeared, in consequence of a constitutional objection to taking advice, or to “going back upon his word,” when he had made up his mind to do something or to go somewhere.  And this drew from the boatswain the sad fate of a comrade of his, who had sailed twice round the world, been ship-wrecked four times, in three collisions, and twice aboard ships that took fire, had Yellow Jack in the West Indies, and sunstroke at the Cape, lost a middle finger from frost-bite in the north of China, and one eye in a bit of a row at San Francisco, and came safe home after it all, and married a snug widow in a pork-shop at Wapping Old Stairs, and got out of his course steering home through a London fog on Guy Fawkes Day, and walked straight into the river, and was found at low tide next morning with a quid of tobacco in his cheek, and nothing missing about him but his glass eye, which shows, as the boatswain said, that “Fogs is fogs anywhere, and a nasty thing too.”

It was towards dark, when we had been fourteen days at sea, that our own fog suddenly lifted, and the good news flew from mouth to mouth that we might be “in about midnight.”  But the fog came down again, and I do not think that the whole fourteen days put together felt so long as the hours of that one night through which the fog-horn blew, and we longed for day.

I was leaning against the bulwarks at eight o’clock the next morning.  White mist was all around us, a sea with no horizon.  Suddenly, like the curtain of a theatre, the mist rose.  Gradually the horizon-line appeared, then a line of low coast, which, muddy-looking as it was, made one’s heart beat thick and fast.  Then lines of dark wood; then the shore was dotted with grey huts; then the sun came out, the breeze was soft and mild, and the air became strangely scented, and redolent of pine forests.  Nearer the coast took more shape, though it was still low, rather bare and dotted with brushwood and grey stones low down, and always crowned with pines.  Then habitations began to sparkle along the shore.  Red roofs, cardboard-looking churches, little white wooden houses, and stiffish trees mixed everywhere.  And the pine odour on the breeze was sweeter and sweeter with every breath one drew.

Suddenly I found Alister’s arm round my shoulder.

“Isn’t it glorious?” I exclaimed.

“Aye, aye,” he said, and then, as if afraid he had not said enough, he added with an effort:  “The toun’s built almost entirely of wood, I’m told, with a population of close on 30,000 inhabitants.”

“What a fellow you are!” I groaned:  “Alister, aren’t you glad we’re safe here?  Are you ever pleased about anything?”