“Fine, full flavor,” he answered through shut teeth.  “Guess we’ve slowed down a little, haven’t we?  I’ll skip out and see what the log says.”

“I might if I vhas you,” said the German.

Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail.  He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back.  The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flag-pole.  There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling “stogie” joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul.  His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze.  He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back.  Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.

He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks.  Slowly he remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but was too weak to fit things together.  A new smell filled his nostrils; wet and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt water.  When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back clothed in a blue jersey.

“It’s no good,” thought the boy.  “I’m dead, sure enough, and this thing is in charge.”

He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair.

“Aha!  You feel some pretty well now?” it said.  “Lie still so:  we trim better.”

With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit beyond.  But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey’s talk.  “Fine good job, I say, that I catch you.  Eh, wha-at?  Better good job, I say, your boat not catch me.  How you come to fall out?”

“I was sick,” said Harvey; “sick, and couldn’t help it.”

“Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little.  Then I see you come all down.  Eh, wha-at?  I think you are cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft —­ dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you.  So you shall not die this time.”

“Where am I?” said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly safe where he lay.

“You are with me in the dory —­ Manuel my name, and I come from schooner ‘We’re Here’ of Gloucester.  I live to Gloucester.  By-and-by we get supper.  Eh, wha-at?”