Across we went, one after the other. West-sou'west was the course to a stake-boat, which we were told would be found off Egg Rock, fourteen miles away. We had only the compass to go by, for at the start it was rain and drizzle, as well as wind and a big sea, and you couldn't see a mile ahead. On the way we shot by the New Rochelle, which had started ahead with the intention of waiting for the fleet at the first stake-boat. Now she was headed back, wabbing awfully. From Billie Simms, who went over part of the course in the Henry Clay Parker ahead of the fleet, we got word of the trouble as we went by. The New Rochelle was beginning to leak. "You c'n spit between her deck-planks and into her hold--she's that loose," hollered Billie. I don't think the fishermen aboard of her minded much so long as she stayed afloat, but her captain, a properly licensed man, did, I expect, and so she put back with some of them growling, I heard afterward, "and after paying their little old three dollars to see only the start of the race." Her captain reported, when he got in, that he didn't see anything outside but a lot of foolish fishermen trying to drown themselves. The first leg was before the wind and the Lucy Foster and the Colleen Bawn went it like bullets. I don't expect ever again to see vessels run faster than they did that morning. On some of those tough passages from the Banks fishing vessels may at times have gone faster than either of these did that morning. It is likely, for where a lot of able vessels are all the time trying to make fast passages--skippers who are not afraid to carry sail and vessels that can stand the dragging--and in all kinds of chances--there must in the course of years of trying be some hours when they do get over an everlasting lot of water. But there are no means of checking up. Half the time the men do not haul the log for half a day or more. Some of the reports of speed of fishermen at odd times have been beyond all records, and so people who do not know said they must be impossible. But here was a measured course and properly anchored stake-boats--and the Lucy and the Colleen did that first leg of almost fourteen sea-miles in fifty minutes, which is better than a 16-1/2 knot clip, and that means over nineteen land miles an hour. I think anybody would call that pretty fast going. And, as some of them said afterward, "Lord in Heaven! suppose we'd had smooth water!" But I don't think that the sea checked them so very much--not as much as one might think, for they were driving these vessels. XXXII O'DONNELL CARRIES AWAY BOTH MASTS