"As for the sea," he began to say, "I am--" But the statement, which he was not to verify on this day, ended in a shriek. For at that moment a great green wave hopped exultingly over the bows, and thenceforward all the way to the Bishop the lugger shipped much water. M. Fournier's behaviour became deplorable. As Isaacs bluntly and angrily summarised it, "he lay upon the thwarts and screeched like a rook;" and in his appeals to his mother he was quite conventionally French. He made no attempt to land upon the Lighthouse. The relief men were hoisted up in the sling, the head-keeper and one of his assistants were lowered, and the lugger started upon its homeward run before the wind. The fog thickened and lightened about them as they threaded the intricate channels of the western islands. Now it was a thin grey mist, parting here and there in long corridors, driven this way and that, twirling in spires of smoke, shepherded by the winds; now again it hung close about them an impenetrable umber, while the crew in short quick tones and gestures of the arms mapped out the rocks and passages. About them they could hear the roar of the breaking waves and the rush of water up slabs and over ledges, and then the "glumph glumph" as the wave sucked away. At times, too, the fog lifted from the surface and hung very low, massed above their heads, so that the black hillocks of the islets stood out in the sinister light like headstones of a cemetery of the sea, and at the feet of them the water was white like a flash of hungry teeth. It was at one such moment, when the boat had just passed through Crebawethan Neck, that M. Fournier, who had been staring persistently over the starboard bulwark, suddenly startled the crew. "There's a ship on shore. _Tenez_--look!" he cried. "There, there!" And as he spoke the mist drove between his eyes and what he declared that he saw. Zebedee Isaacs looked in the direction. "On Jacky's Rock?" he asked, nodding towards a menacing column of black rock which was faintly visible. "No, no--beyond!--There!" And M. Fournier excitedly gesticulated. He seemed at that moment to have lost all his terror of the sea. "On Rosevear, then," said the keeper of the lighthouse, and he strained towards Rosevear. "I see nothing," he said, "and--" "There's nothing to see," replied Isaacs, who did not alter his course. "But it's true," exclaimed the little Belgian. "I see it no more myself. But I have seen it, I tell you. I have seen the mast above the island--"