"As if I didn' know yer was comparin' 'im with Sam Bossom all day! W'y, I seen it in yer face!" Getting no answer, she went on after a pause, "Sam 'd never a' thought o' this, not if 'e'd lived to be a 'undred." "All the same, I like Sam better," said the boy sleepily. They slept soundly after their wanderings. The crew returned shortly before half-past eleven, and tumbled aboard "happy and glorious"--so Bill afterwards described their condition, in the language of the National Anthem. But the racket was mainly for'ard, and did not awake the children. After this, silence descended on the _Evan Evans_, and lasted for five long hours. Still they slept; and the voice of the mate, when a little before dawn he started cursing and calling to the men to tumble up, was a voice heard in dreams and without alarm. It was, as a matter of fact, scarcely more operative in the forecastle than in the cabin. But Bill in the intervals of slumber had visited the furnaces, and kept up a good head of steam; and in the chill of dawn he and the mate cast off warps and (with the pilot) worked the steamer out through the ship lock, practically unaided. The mate, when not in liquor, was a first-class seaman; and Bill, left alone between the furnaces and the engines, perspired in all the glory of his true vocation. The noise of hooting, loud and protracted, awoke Tilda at last, and she raised herself in her bunk to stare at the apparition of Bill in the cabin doorway--a terrifying apparition, too, black with coal-dust and shining with sweat. "Wot's 'appened?" For one moment her sleepy brain confused him with the diabolical noise overhead. "Nothin'," he answered, "'cept that you must tumble out quick, you two. We're off Avonmouth, an' the whistle's goin' for the old man." They tumbled out and redded up the place in a hurry, folding away the rugs and linen--which Bill, with his grimed fingers, did not dare to touch--and stowing them as he directed. A damp fog permeated the cabin. Even the engine-room (Bill reported) was full of it, and how the mate had brought her along through it and picked up Avonmouth was a marvel. "Single-'anded too, as you may say. 'E's a world's wonder, that man." The children too thought it marvellous when they reached the deck and gazed about them. They could spy no shore, not so much as a blur to indicate it, but were wrapped wholly in a grey fog; and down over the steamer's tall sides (for she was returning light after delivering a cargo of Welsh coal) they stared upon nothing but muddy water crawling beneath the fog. They heard the mate's voice calling from the bridge, and the fog seemed to remove both bridge and voice to an immeasurable height above them.