Nothing can make the North Atlantic a pleasant sea.  Of the beauty and variety of warmer waters we had nothing, but we had the excitement of some rough weather, and a good deal of sociability and singing when it was fair, and we were very glad to be with our old mates again, and yet more glad that every knot on our course was a step nearer home.  Dennis and I were not idle because we were independent, and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.  As to Alister, there was no difficulty in seeing how well he stood with the red-bearded captain, and how good a friend his own energy and perseverance (with perhaps some touch of clannishness to boot) had gained for him.  Dennis and I always shared his watches, and they were generally devoted to the discussing and re-discussing of our prospects, interspersed with fragmentary French lessons.

From the day that Alister had heard Dennis chatter to the squaw, through all our ups and downs, at sea and ashore, he had never flagged in his persistent profiting by Dennis’s offer to teach him to speak French.  It was not, perhaps, a very scholarly method which they pursued, but we had no time for study, so Dennis started Alister every day with a new word or sentence, and Alister hammered this into his head as he went about his work, and recapitulated what he had learned before.  By the time we were on our homeward voyage, the sentences had become very complex, and it seemed probable that Alister’s ambition to take part in a “two-handed crack” in French with his teacher, before the shamrock fell to pieces, would be realized.

“What he has learnt is wonderful, I can tell ye,” said Dennis to me, “but his accent’s horrid!  And we’d get on faster than we do if he didn’t argue every step we go, though he doesn’t know a word that I’ve not taught him.”

But far funnier than Alister’s corrections of his teacher, was a curious jealousy which the boatswain had of the Scotch lad’s new accomplishment.  We could not quite make out the grounds of it, except that the boatswain himself had learned one or two words of what he called parly voo when he was in service at the boys’ school, and he was jealously careful of the importance which his shreds and scraps of education gave him in the eyes of the ordinary uneducated seaman.  With Dennis and me he was uniformly friendly, and he was a most entertaining companion.

Owing to head winds, our passage was longer than the average.  A strange thing happened towards the end of it.  We had turned in for sleep one night, when I woke to the consciousness that Dennis had got out of his berth, and was climbing past mine, but I was so sleepy that I did not speak, and was only sure that it was not a dream, when Alister and I went on deck for the next watch, and found Dennis walking up and down in the morning mist.

“Have you had no sleep?” I asked, for his face looked haggard.

“I couldn’t.  For dreaming,” he said, awkwardly.