At midnight a rollicking breeze that piped from out the north caught the sensitive vane napping, and before the dawn broke had quite tired it out, shifting from point to point, now west, now east, now nor’east-by-east, and now back to north again.  By the time Morgan had boiled his coffee and had cut his bacon into slivers ready for the frying-pan the restless wind, as if ashamed of its caprices, had again veered to the north-east, and then, as if determined ever after to lead a better life, had pulled itself together and had at last settled down to a steady blow from that quarter.

The needle of the aneroid fastened to the wall of the sitting-room, and in reach of everybody’s eye, had also made a night of it.  In fact, it had not had a moment’s peace since Captain Holt reset its register the day before.  All its efforts for continued good weather had failed.  Slowly but surely the baffled and disheartened needle had sagged from “Fair” to “Change,” dropped back to “Storm,” and before noon the next day had about given up the fight and was in full flight for “Cyclones and Tempests.”

Uncle Isaac Polhemus, sitting at the table with one eye on his game of dominoes (Green was his partner) and the other on the patch of sky framed by the window, read the look of despair on the honest face of the aneroid, and rising from his chair, a “double three” in his hand, stepped to where the weather prophet hung.

“Sompin’s comin’ Sam,” he said solemnly.  “The old gal’s got a bad setback.  Ain’t none of us goin’ to git a wink o’ sleep to-night, or I miss my guess.  Wonder how the wind is.”  Here he moved to the door and peered out.  “Nor’-east and puffy, just as I thought.  We’re goin’ to hev some weather, Sam—­ ye hear?—­some weather!” With this he regained his chair and joined the double three to the long tail of his successes.  Good weather or bad weather—­ peace or war—­was all the same to Uncle Isaac.  What he wanted was the earliest news from the front.

Captain Holt took a look at the sky, the aneroid and the wind—­not the arrow; old sea-dogs know which way the wind blows without depending on any such contrivance—­the way the clouds drift, the trend of the white-caps, the set of a distant sail, and on black, almost breathless nights, by the feel of a wet finger held quickly in the air, the coolest side determining the wind point.

On this morning the clouds attracted the captain’s attention.  They hung low and drifted in long, straggling lines.  Close to the horizon they were ashy pale; being nearest the edge of the brimming sea, they had, no doubt, seen something the higher and rosier-tinted clouds had missed; something of the ruin that was going on farther down the round of the sphere.  These clouds the captain studied closely, especially a prismatic sun-dog that glowed like a bit of rainbow snipped off by wind-scissors, and one or two dirt spots sailing along by themselves.

During the captain’s inspection Archie hove in sight, wiping his hands with a wad of cotton waste.  He and Parks had been swabbing out the firing gun and putting the polished work of the cart apparatus in order.