"The equinoctials, Angus?" said Queen Titania, with some solemnity of face. "Oh, I suppose so," said he cheerfully. "Well, I have been through them two or three times before," said she, "but never in an exposed place like this." "We shall fight through it first-rate," said he—and you should have seen Mary Avon’s eyes; she was clearly convinced that fifteen equinoctial gales could not do us the slightest harm so long as this young Doctor was on board. "It is a fine stroke of luck that the gale is from the south-west. If it had come on from the east, we should have been in a bad way. As it is, there is not a rock between here and the opposite shore at Glenelg, and even if we drag our anchors, we shall catch up somewhere at the other side." "I hope we shall not have to trust to that," says Queen Titania, who in her time has seen something of the results of vessels dragging their anchors. As the day wore on, the fury of the gale still increased: the wind moaning and whistling by turns, the yacht straining at her cables, and rolling and heaving about. Despite the tender entreaties of the women, Dr. Angus would go on deck again; for now Captain John had resolved on lowering the topmast, and also on getting the boom and mainsail from their crutch down on to the deck. Being above in this weather was far from pleasant. The showers occasionally took the form of hail; and so fiercely were the pellets driven by the wind that they stung where they hit the face. And the outlook around was dismal enough—the green sea and its whirling spindrift; the heavy waves breaking all along the Glenelg shores; the writhing of the gloomy sky. We had a companion, by the way, in this exposed place—a great black schooner that heavily rolled and pitched as she strained at her two anchors. The skipper of her did not leave her bows for a moment the whole day, watching for the first symptom of dragging. Then that night. As the darkness came over, the wind increased in shrillness until it seemed to tear with a scream through the rigging; and though we were fortunately under the lee of the Skye hills, we could hear the water smashing on the bows of the yacht. As night fell that shrill whistling and those recurrent shocks grew in violence, until we began to wonder how long the cables would hold. "And if our anchors give, I wonder where we shall go to," said Queen Titania, in rather a low voice. "I don’t care," said Miss Avon, quite contentedly.