"It's a baddish gale that's got hold of the old _Hurst Castle_, and that's a fact," the doctor said, when they had finished with me, in answer to the questioning look that he saw in my eyes. "But it's nothing to worry about," he went on; "except that it's hard on you, with that badly broken head of yours, to be tumbled about worse than Mother O'Donohue's pig when they took it to Limerick fair in a cart. So just lie easy there among your pillows, my son; and pretend that it's exercise that you are taking for the good of your liver--which is a torpid and a sluggish organ in the best of us, and always the better for such a shaking as the sea is giving us now. And be remembering that the _Hurst Castle_ is a Clyde-built boat, with every plate and rivet in her as good as a Scotsman knows how to make it--and in such matters it's the Sandies who know more than any other men alive. In my own ken she's pulled through storms fit to founder the Giant's Causeway and been none the worse for 'em, and so it's herself that's certain to weather this bit of a gale--which has been at its worst no less than two times this same morning, and therefore by all rule and reason must be for breaking soon. "And be thinking, too," he added as he was leaving me, "that I'll be coming in to look after you now and then when I have a spare minute--for there are some others, I'm sorry to say, who are after needing me; and as soon as the gale goes down a bit I'll overhaul again that cracked head of yours, and likely be singing you at the same time for your amusement a real Irish song." But not much was there of singing, nor of any other show of lightheartedness, aboard the _Hurst Castle_ during the next twelve hours. So far from breaking, the gale--as the doctor had called it, although in reality it was a hurricane--got worse steadily; with only a lull now and then, as though for breath-taking, and then a fiercer rush of wind--before which the ship would reel and shiver, while the grinding of her iron frame and the crunching of her wood-work made a sort of wild chorus of groans and growls. For all my wedging of pillows I was near to flying over the storm-board out of my berth with some of the plunges that she took; and very likely I should have had such a tumble had not the doctor returned again in a little while and with the mattress from the upper berth so covered me as to jam me fast--and how he managed to do this, under the circumstances, I am sure I don't know.