say the other fellow was? Edwin: I have him! Why, dear me! This is very sad! Naval officer, and bad at that; send him on at _once_!’ So then we heard the first one hail us. ‘Outside there! You Crutchley! Edwin! Go round by the left immediately.’ But we didn’t see it, being sailormen and willing to contest the point; so we called out that we wanted a rest, being very tired and thirsty--could they not let us come inside and sit down for a while? (you see, that gate was not good holding ground), but a loud voice said, ‘Go away! be off immediately! We shall have others here to deal with directly.’ But we held on; presently a long pole came out of the fog and proceeded to shove us off and in so doing gave us some pretty hard knocks. Still we held on; but at last we each got a most awful punch with the pole end which made us let go, and we so far forgot ourselves as to say cuss words; whereupon there came a clap of thunder and we found ourselves tumbling about anyhow. When we got way upon us again and could see, we found that my starboard wing was singed and that the feathers on your head were badly burned. We consulted what to do, and as we could only just see the light we knew that we must have been blown a long way off shore; we therefore decided to work up to it again, and though we flapped our level best and tried all we knew, we could not rise the light at all and had to give it up. We then noticed that we seemed to be in a strong set, for the light was broad away on the starboard bow, while on the port bow there was a reddish glow which made us feel rather creepy, and we both remarked that we had got into a kind of haze which had a sort of burnt powdery smell. We saw the white light dip, but it comforted us a bit to see that the other did not get any redder--we kept ourselves under easy speed with a bright look-out all round, and to make all sure, one of us wore ship every hour, just dropping a little to leeward and coming up again. Time went by slowly, but we didn’t care about making much headway ‘to the left,’ and at last we sighted something moving, and carefully edged down on it in open order. As we got nearer we saw it had wings and we made it out to be a hoary old chap of a decidedly Egyptian head, but there was no mistaking him, for he was a real true blue old sailorman by the way he worked his wings, which showed he had been a long time afloat, and we could not but admire his style. As we came up he sheered off, but we were one on each side of him and had evidently plenty of wing power in reserve, so he stopped and took a long pull at a bottle that he hauled out from under his port wing and then hove a deep sigh. Now the sight of that bottle did us good and we hailed him, saying that if he didn’t want it all we should be glad of a drop, for we had _come a long way_; he looked at us compassionately and shook his head: ‘No such luck,’ says he; ‘why, I’ve been sucking this bottle for nigh on to four thousand years and can’t get a drop