She possessed no single good point in her favour. She had swung in harbour so long that everywhere above the water-line she was as staunch as a herring-net. Her standing rigging, being of wire, was merely rusted, but her running gear was something too appalling to think about. As for her bottom, if she had been turned up and dried for a day (so Haigh cheerfully averred), there would have been enough bushy cover on it to put down pheasants in. Fittings, even the barest necessaries, were painfully lacking, as the man had been living riotously on them for over a month and a half. A Chinese pirate could not have picked her much cleaner. What he was pleased to term the "superfluities of the main and after cabins" had gone first, fetching fair prices. Afterwards he had peddled his gear little by little, dining one day off a riding-light, going to a theatre the next on two marline spikes and a sister-block, and so on. His ground tackle, long saved up for a _bonne bouche_, had provided funds for that last night in the gambling hell, where we both got cleared out together; and the balance that was left didn't represent a mosquito's ransom. Haigh told me all this as we walked back again down the narrow streets to the quay, and I suggested that although Mediterranean air was good, we couldn't exactly live on it during the passage across. But he pointed out that as his dinghy was very old and rotten, it would be quite a useless encumbrance on the cruise; and so, dropping me on board the cutter, he sculled off again to swap this old wreck for provisions. I roused out a weather-thinned mainsail, black with mildew, and bent it; and by the time that was on the spars, he had completed his barter, and had been put on board again by a friend. We had a dozen words of conversation, and then got small canvas hoisted and quietly slipped moorings. The night was very black, and thick with driving rain; and we slid out through the pier-heads unquestioned save by a passing launch which hailed, and was politely answered in gibberish. There was a singular lack of formality about our departure which was much to be regretted. But there was some small trouble about big accumulations of harbour dues and such minor items, which would have had to be settled in return for a clearance _en regle_; and, remembering how history was galloping, we could not afford the time to deal with them. And so, after a narrow squeak of being cut down by a big steamer just outside, we found ourselves close-hauled under all plain sail, making a long leg with a short one to follow. "Funds wouldn't run to the luxury of a chart," observed Haigh when I inquired about this trifle, "but I had a look at a big Mediterranean track chart at the place where I bartered the dinghy, and the course to Port Mahon is due south-west, as near as no matter." "As near as no matter," groaned I in response.