Farrar took the helm and hauled in the sheet, while the Celebrity, Mr. Cooke, and the guests donned their rain-clothes.  The water ahead was now like blue velvet, and the rain pelting.  The Maria was heeling to the squall by the time the Celebrity appeared at the cabin door, enveloped in an ample waterproof, a rubber cover on his yachting cap.  A fool despises a danger he has never experienced, and our author, with a remark about a spanking breeze, made a motion to take the wheel.  But Farrar, the flannel of his shirt clinging to the muscular outline of his shoulders, gave him a push which sent him sprawling against the lee refrigerator.  Well Miss Thorn was not there to see.

“You will have to answer for this,” he cried, as he scrambled to his feet and clutched the weather wash-board with one hand, while he shook the other in Farrar’s face.

“Crocker,” said Farrar to me, coolly, “keep that idiot out of the way for a while, or we’ll all be drowned.  Tie him up, if necessary.”

I was relieved from this somewhat unpleasant task.  Mr. Cooke, with his back to the rain, sat an amused witness to the mutiny, as blissfully ignorant as the Celebrity of the character of a lake squall.

“I appeal to you, as the owner of this yacht, Mr. Cooke,” the Celebrity shouted, “whether, as the person delegated by you to take charge of it, I am to suffer indignity and insult.  I have sailed larger yachts than this time and again on the coast, at—­” here he swallowed a portion of a wave and was mercifully prevented from being specific.

But Mr. Cooke was looking a trifle bewildered.  It was hardly possible for him to cling to the refrigerator, much less quell a mutiny.  One who has sailed the lakes well knows how rapidly they can be lashed to fury by a storm, and the wind was now spinning the tops of the waves into a blinding spray.  Although the Maria proved a stiff boat and a seaworthy, she was not altogether without motion; and the set expression on Farrar’s face would have told me, had I not known it, that our situation at that moment was no joke.  Repeatedly, as she was held up to it, a precocious roller would sweep from bow to stern, until we without coats were wet and shivering.

The close and crowded cabin of a small yacht is not an attractive place in rough weather; and one by one the Four emerged and distributed themselves about the deck, wherever they could obtain a hold.  Some of them began to act peculiarly.  Upon Mr. Cooke’s unwillingness or inability to interfere in his behalf, the Celebrity had assumed an aggrieved demeanor, but soon the motion of the Maria became more and more pronounced, and the difficulty of maintaining his decorum likewise increased.  The ruddy color left his face, which grew pale with effort.  I will do him the justice to say that the effort was heroic:  he whistled popular airs, and snatches of the grand opera; he relieved Mr. Cooke of his glasses (of which Mr. Cooke had neglected to relieve himself), and scanned the sea line busily.  But the inevitable deferred is frequently more violent than the inevitable taken gracefully, and the confusion which at length overtook the Celebrity was utter as his humiliation was complete.  We laid him beside Mr. Cooke in the cockpit.