Port a trifle." The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep smoothed out, blue and oily, round them.

When they whistled for a wind only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August.

They lay on the deck with bare feet and arms, telling one another what they would order at their first meal ashore; for now the land was in plain sight.

A Gloucester swordfish-boat drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit flourishing his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the wet.

"And all's well!" he sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big liner.