We smiled again, said amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation.

Yet it was, if anything, worse than ever.

We were farther from Japan than the night we left the _Ghost_.

Nor could I more than roughly guess our latitude and longitude.

At a calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during the seventy and odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one hundred and fifty miles to the north-east.