And he turned with a kindly laugh to Loo Barebone, who was lying on a heap of old sails by the stern rail, concealing as well as he could the pangs of a consuming hunger. “One sees that you will never be a sailor,” added the man from Fecamp, with that rough humour which sailors use. “Perhaps I do not want to be one,” replied Barebone, with a ready gaiety which had already made him several friends on this tarry vessel, although the voyage had lasted but four days. “Listen,” interrupted the Captain, holding up a mittened hand. “Listen! I hear a bell, or else it is my conscience.” Barebone had heard it for some time. It was the bell-buoy at the mouth of Harwich River. But he did not deem it necessary for one who was a prisoner on board, and no sailor, to interfere in the navigation of a vessel now making its way to the Faroe fisheries for the twentieth time. “My conscience,” he observed, “rings louder than that.” The Captain took a turn round the tiller with a rope made fast to the rail for the purpose, and went to the side of the ship, lifting his nose toward the west. “It is the land,” he said. “I can smell it. But it is only the Blessed Virgin who knows where we are.” He turned and gave a gruff order to a man half hidden in the mist in the waist of the boat to try a heave of the lead. The sound of the bell could be heard clearly enough now--the uncertain, hesitating clang of a bell-buoy rocked in the tideway--with its melancholy note of warning. Indeed, there are few sounds on sea or land more fraught with lonesomeness and fear. Behind it and beyond it a faint “tap-tap” was now audible. Barebone knew it to be the sound of a caulker's hammer in the Government repairing yard on the south side. They were drifting past the mouth of the Harwich River. The leadsman called out a depth which Loo could have told without the help of line or lead. For he had served a long apprenticeship on these coasts under a captain second to none in the North Sea. He turned a little on his bed of sails under repair, at which the Captain had been plying his needle while the weather remained clear, and glanced over his shoulder toward the ship's dinghy towing astern. The rope that held it was made fast round the rail a few feet away from him. The boat itself was clumsy, shaped like a walnut, of a preposterous strength and weight. It was fitted with a short, stiff mast and a balance lug-sail. It floated more lightly on the water than the bigger vessel, which was laden with coal and provender and salt for the North Atlantic fishery, and the painter hung loose, while the dinghy, tide-borne, sidled up to stern of its big companion like a kitten following its mother with the uncertain steps of infancy.