Jimmy Marshall, fear clutching at his heart, refused to mount the futtock shrouds; springing to the forward leg of the main topmast backstays, he slid to the deck while the rest of us went aloft. The stoutest of us, however, were touched with superstitious feelings. The "corposants," as the men called them, started us on a series of ghost stories in the night watches on deck. A few days later we were becalmed in a dense fog, such as sometimes is encountered in the warm, damp region bordering the line. Joe went aft to relieve the wheel just after listening to a gruesome tale. A giant man out in the fog over the quarter reached for Joe when abreast of the open door of the wheel house. Joe nearly fainted with fright, at the sight of his own shadow thrown on the fog wall by the naked binnacle light that the helmsman had taken from the cowl to trim. CHAPTER XII MAKING PORT One hundred and seven days out from Sandy Hook, we crossed the line for the second time in longitude 122° west from Greenwich. The grooming for port then started in grim earnest. Holystones were brought out and the time-honored couplet of the sea, Six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou art able, And on the seventh holystone the deck and scrape the cable. became a matter of routine on board the _Fuller_. Captain Nichols had never been in the islands before, in fact none of us had, and we were to make our acquaintance with them dressed up and polished in Yankee form. The art of holystoning, as practiced on American deepwater ships, deserves a special niche in the archives of the sea. No more thorough proceeding can be imagined. To the steamship hand who holystones like a gentleman, at the end of a long handle, the art has lost its fine points. On the _Fuller_ we dug into the work in deep sea fashion. Our knees became sore from constant "praying" and the skin on our hands was worn down thin, making us tender in hauling at the braces or going aloft. To overcome the hardness of the deck, we rigged up pieces of board to which three cleats were nailed and a strip of old canvas stretched over them. This afforded a yielding cushion to kneel on and kept our legs out of the water swishing about with the rolling of the ship. We worked in gangs, sawing away with the stones and wearing a scum of wood from the deck. Each man soon became jealous of the work done by his shipmates and we were careful to keep all hands going, as there was a certain amount of deck to be gone over, and the sooner finished the better. In holystoning we used two sizes of stones, the larger ones called "bibles" and the small pieces, useful for getting into the corners and along the edges of paintwork, known as "prayer books."