"It's up the spout this time," said Hardy. "Jump to the side, Julia; report what you see. There you go, to starboard--to windward, to windward!" He held the wheel, and the girl shrieked, "I can't see for the smell." "Hold your nose and skin your eyes, and tell me what you see." "A great deal of fire, and a black mass in the midst of it lined with foam, and oh, what a horrible smell!" She came staggering to her lover's side in revolt of sickened senses. "A dead whale," said Hardy, whose nose was not entirely fastidious. "Hold the wheel, dear," and he sprang to the quarter and saw the thing; that is, he saw the shadow, it loomed so that it might have been a little island. The fire of the sea played about it as the reflected lightning of the hidden storm winks and flashes in the soft indigo of the ocean recess. The sea caressed this floating dunghill with those same white, cruel fingers with which it casts the mutilated corpse ashore. "The air sweetens," said Hardy, returning to the wheel. "Go below for a nip of brandy, and bring me one, dear." And he brought the ship to her course. He did not greatly like the look of the weather. For perhaps an hour and a half he had been sleeping; this was a good "turn in" for a sailor-man who signs articles to work for the shipowner for twenty-four hours in the day, a brutal and inhuman tax upon suffering men, in no other walk of life to be heard of. Anyhow he could not leave the ship in Julia's charge with those dimly winking stars growing sparer yet, with increasing moisture on the wing of the wind like the early breath of a wet squall. "I don't expect the wind to shift," said he, "but it's bound to come on harder presently. Get you into that hen-coop and rest your limbs if not your brain. I expect I shall be wanting you before midnight." She obeyed him as though she had been a sailor or a dog, and dissolved into the black void of the hen-coop. You could not see the faintest glimmer of her face, nor the dimmest outline of her shape. The Newfoundland had come aft and berthed itself. The animal knew that when Hardy was at the wheel it was its watch below. Now the ship was under such small canvas that her cloths were not more than she could stand up with if it blew half a gale from abeam or abaft the beam. Those were the days of single topsails, and in all three topsails a single reef had been tied by the survivors of the crew in the heavy night before they left for the Frenchman. It would then come perhaps to a drag upon a staysail down-haul and to letting go the outer jib-halliards, leaving the unfurled sail to convulse itself into bulbs and bellies of canvas upon the jibboom. Certainly Hardy single-handed could not lay out upon the jibboom and furl a big jib: he did not mean to try.