"No, that is a very important item, especially as we dare not land to buy anything, for some days." "What rate are we going through the water, do you think?" "Jules said we were sailing about four knots an hour when we were going down the river, and about three when we had turned south and pulled the sail in. I suppose we are about halfway between the two now, so we can count it as three knots and a half." "That would make," Ryan said, after making the calculation, "eighty-four miles in twenty-four hours." "Bravo, Dicky! I doubted whether your mental powers were equal to so difficult a calculation. Well, Jules said that it was about four hundred miles to Corunna, and about a hundred and fifty to Santander, beyond which he thought we could land safely at any village." "Oh, let us stick to the boat as long as we can!" Ryan exclaimed. "Certainly. I have no more desire to be tramping among those mountains and taking our chance with the peasants than you have, and if the wind keeps as it is now we should be at Corunna in something like five days. But that would be almost too much to hope for. So that it does but keep in its present direction till we are past Santander, I shall be very well satisfied." The mountains of Navarre and Biscay were within sight from the time they had left the river, and it did not need the compass to show them which way they should steer. There were many fishing boats from Nivelle, Urumia, and Saint Sebastian to be seen, dotted over the sea on their left. They kept farther out than the majority of these, and did not pass any of them nearer than half a mile. After steering for a couple of hours, Terence relinquished the oar to his companion. "You must get accustomed to it, as well as I," he said, "for we must take it in turns, at night." By twelve o'clock they were abreast of a town; which was, they had no doubt, San Sebastian. They were now some four miles from the Spanish coast. They were travelling at about the same rate as that at which they had started, but the wind came off the high land, and sometimes in such strong puffs that they had to loosen the sheet. The fisherman had shown them how to shorten sail by tying down the reef points and shifting the tack and, in the afternoon, the squalls came so heavily that they thought it best to lower the sail and reef it. Towards nightfall the wind had risen so much that they made for the land, and when darkness came on threw out the little grapnel the boat carried, a hundred yards or so from the shore, at a point where no village was visible. Here they were sheltered from the wind and, spreading out the nets to form a bed, they laid themselves down in the bottom of the boat, pulling the sail partly over them. "This is jolly enough," Ryan said. "It is certainly pleasanter to lie here and look at the stars than to be shut up in that hiding place of Jules's." "It is a great nuisance having to stop, though," Terence replied. "It is a loss of some forty miles."