When the slow day broke, dim and clangorous with the gale, they dallied over a meal, talking of many things to pass the time, and then went up on deck, and with a brandished stick he ridded the ship of the clustering birds. They shrieked threateningly and came swooping at him on the wings of the wind, with hungry beaks and merciless eyes. But here he was at home and would not suffer their invasion, and finally they gave it up and fled to the sandhills, cursing him shrilly as they went. "Oh, there's one gone downstairs," cried The Girl; and running down after it, he found a great black cormorant squawking fearfully round the cabin and dashing itself against the walls in its wild attempts at escape. At sight of him it grew frantic, but finally found its way out of the hatch again, almost upsetting The Girl in its passage, and then tore away to tell its fellows of the awful place it had been in, which smelt so good but was so much easier to get into than out of. Wulfrey had to open one of the lee ports and let the gale blow through to get rid of the smell of it, and then he went up again to The Girl. They watched the great rollers thundering on the beach beyond the spit, rocketing their white spume high into the grim black sky, and lashing over at times into the lake. And when he called to her to look the other way she watched with amazement sandhills of size melt away before her eyes and re-form themselves in quite different places. "But it is past words!" she cried into his ear. They stared long too at the 'Jane and Mary' of Boston, but saw no sign of life aboard of her except the birds that clustered there unmolested. "It is a most amazing place," she said, when they went down again, as she dusted the saltness out of her hair with her hand. "Is it often like this?" "Very often in the winter, I should fear. We've had our best weather since you came." "I don't think I want to live all my life here," she said dejectedly. "I love the sun." And he would dearly have liked to tell her that he did the same, but that for him she made more sunshine even than the sun itself. Instead, he prosaically set her to the making of more fishing-lines, in case of accident to the one they had, and he himself hammered away at more hooks, burning and ragging his fingers out of knowledge, but producing hooks of a kind somehow. XXXIX The gale slackened on the third day, and Wulfrey was actually relieved in his mind at the sight of Macro hurrying ashore on his raft, after fresh meat, and, from the fact of his buckets, water, which he had probably been too careless, or too drunk, to secure during the storm. For the thought of his possibly lying there alone and foodless had not been a pleasant one, good reason as he had for disliking the man.