So this time he ordered us not to set where we were or he'd seize our vessel. Several Gloucester vessels had been confiscated just before this and the owners had to pay the fine to recover them. One owner disputed the judgment and his case was then waiting settlement. Another who refused to pay saw his vessel turned into a lightship and placed down Miramichi way in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where it is yet. This day the commander of the Lynx might have some reason to think that his order ended that for us--and we could almost see him chuckling--but it didn't. A fog was creeping up at the time and in ten minutes it was on us, and under cover of the fog we got a little school--the same school we thought and on the exact spot where the cutter was lying when she ordered us off. Didn't we cackle though when we bailed it in? Oh, no! It was not much of a school--only twenty barrels--but it made us all feel fine. Not alone did we feel that we had got the better of the English cutter, but also that luck was coming to us again. We justified ourselves by saying that we honestly believed we were outside the three-mile limit, and that our judgment was as good as theirs. That night the forec's'le of the Johnnie Duncan presented one of the most beatific scenes I ever saw. Everybody was in the temper of an angel. There was nothing doing--no whist at the table, no reading out of upper bunks, no love song from the peak, and no fierce argument on the lockers. We were discussing the cutters and the talk was very soothing. The cook, as usual, was finishing up a batch of dough. You might have thought he was the only man who had been working in a week, were it not for the wet oil-clothes hanging up to dry, and the overhauling of second suits of oil-clothes by some of the gang. Every man, except the cook, who never smoked while at work, was puffing away as if he misdoubted he would ever get another chance for a pipeful in his life. "Harmony most ex-quis-ite," said somebody, and that's what must have been that hung over the forec's'le, and it seemed to be merely in keeping with the heavenly order of things that the atmosphere showed pale blue wherever the rays of the lamp could get a chance to strike through.