ALL winter Jack and I were rather at cross-purposes-not, of course, that Jack knew it! With complete unconsciousness of any lack of enthusiastic response from me, he cheerfully passed most evenings and every Sunday talking about and making plans for Skeletta's reappearance in the summer. In return, I read aloud notices from the papers of glorious foreign tours (prices generally unspecified) and advertisements of seemingly ideal cottages in the country, and met with much the same response-uninterested "ahs " and "m'ms.' Jack is used to my doing a good deal of talking without any fixed intent to it, and when uninterested withdraws his serious attention; but I dare not do this with his prattlings, however monotonously maritime. Sometime I may make an assenting grunt too many, and find myself committed to a

VOL. COXVI.-NO. MCCCV.

scheme for lighting Skeletta with acetylene, or installing a hot-water system! No knight of chivalry could have been more tediously one-ideaed about his Lady Fair than the White Knight about his Lady Skeletta! I suppose it never occurred to either of them that their hearers could possibly be any less enthusiastic! Yet I never had quite the heart or was it merely nerve to say plainly and succinctly : "Oh, take the nasty boat away; I don't want any boat to-day or any other day." And the unconscious one went on making plans for her and me-but always combined !

In the pent-up bitterness of my heart I said something of what I felt one evening when the Don was dining with us and the inevitable subject came up. Pained and surprised, he said

when, on their return, papa presented her with something new to cook in or to sew with !

All that happened was that I gave up drawing Jack's attention to the Shipping or Estate notices, but pored over them

"But I hate cooking; I loathe washing-up, and the foc's'le gives me curvature of the spine."

The Don was sympathetic and relieved; but with a glance at Jack, who was busy making ornamental ends to new manropes, he murmured

"It is as well, perhaps, that Jack does not always listen to half you say."

But in this instance he had listened more than we thought, for Skeletta vanished from his talk for some time after this, and I, partly from perversity, perhaps, but chiefly from a guilty conscience, began to miss her.

This could not go on long; neither puzzlement nor pique could keep Jack off his pet subject, but now it took the form of endless splendid ideas to save me work in the foc's'le! It was very sweet of him, of course, but I began to feel like the super - domesticated mother of the Swiss Family Robinson: when all the rest started out for glorious encounters with interesting animals and educative plants, she remained behind as a matter of course, and was duly elated

-but then I had done it before!

a

A

The virtue was rewarded. "bull," a bear," or perhaps "stag" did something unforeseen but pleasing in the Stock Exchange Circus. In fiction it is as easy to make one's hero a millionaire as anything less, but in real life one is exceedingly pleased with £100, or, to continue zoologically, even a pony"! And it was something between the one and the other that Jack triumphantly acquired. My rapture was modified; for I knew that no alternative method of spending it would occur to Jack but to lay it at the feet, so to speak, of Skeletta, and some more complicated labour-saving horror would be given to me, and we would cruise for an extra fortnight.

I was wrong. The money was laid at my feet. Of course Skeletta was involved in it, and by that much I was right, but for once she was a secondary consideration. The money would be spent in Skeletta, but for me, for-we should have a crew!

Like every granted human wish, I began at once to see the disadvantages! A

crew would occupy the loathed foc's'le instead of me-but it would also occupy the foc's'le berths instead of our friends!

"If one could only contrive to get a collapsible crew," I sighed. Words of ill omen! They came back to us ofttimes to mock us!

Most yachts fit out in May, and their crews are engaged to put through that lengthy job. This was another bright prospect for me, though a gloomy one for Jack, who hated to think of mere hirelings enjoying all the glorious rummagings and pulley-haulings that fitting out entails! As we could not get away till July, not even I could see any sense in paying a crew to loaf at our expense for two months.

pings he ended by remarking, "I have always thought it would be a mistake to marry a clever woman ; and when Jack laughingly added, "And since living on Skeletta you know it!" I was left wondering whether the balance were a credit or debit one for me!

The particular object of the Dhuiné Wassail's admiration at the moment was unknown to me by name; but from his description I gathered that, like Weir of Hermiston, he found her "somehow suitable," and chiefly from her having what they both mistakenly thought an ornament to woman a weak head!

For that or other reasons, the good D.W. was preparing to be co-guest with this meritorious damsel at as many country houses as he could manage to get invited to, and Skeletta would know him no more.

But the Don was delighted to come, and more of my way of thinking about the professional crew than of Jack's. The poor man was always so anxious to help with the

chores," and so unfailingly useless at them that he worried himself without helping any one else, but now he and I could " just talk" without our Skipper's justified strictures on our laziness. The Don said

"You and I, madame, will supply the Celtic element in happy contrast to our English host."

I disclaimed the slightest Celtic tendency, thinking of the D.W. and his unappreciated

on

"Perhaps I should have said Latin to explain myself, but I was thinking of Kipling's lines

And while the Celt is talking from Valencia to Kirkwall, The English-ah, the English !-don't way anything at all !'"

In accordance with the maxim that we needs must love the highest when we know it, Jack has a conviction that every one must enjoy yachting when they try it-the difficulty is to get the right people to want to try it! To explain all the joys of it to a man who finishes with saying, "But what do you do all day?" must be as trying to Jack's ardent soul as atheism to a religious proselytiser!

With those difficulties, why not go alone, one might say and it would probably be a motorist who said so. The larger the car, the oftener one sees it mostly empty, although it takes less love for one's fellow-creature to suffer it to sit beside one than to live with it, night and day, in close proximity ! The sailing fraternity is rather more hospitable, or more fanatical, but for whichever reason it seemed to us unthinkable to have an empty berth on Skeletta.

At last we thought the Lord had provided a ram, in the form of an old friend of Jack's, home from India. We had him to dine-showed him photographs, covered the table with charts, gave him a glowing account of our last cruise-Miss Keatley and all-and Jack even

for washing potatoes with the least amount of labour; who could have resisted an invitatation to come too ? Our guest was not an exuberant talker, but at the end of an hour or so he managed to get in a word.

"My dear fellow, your picture of an ideal summer has been most adequately expressed; there is, as far as I can see, only one drawback, and that is this climate. I am like the Frenchman who visited one of our triste London Exhibitions, and asked, 'Je viens d'arriver. Où est la sortie ?' I am just home, and I am going off again as soon as may be; nothing north of the Mediterranean is any good to me. But if you really want some one who is keen on being uncomfortable-I mean keen on any sporting offer,-what about my boy? He's only eighteen, but what he lacks in age he makes up in adaptability - a quality I have not enough of for your purposes. Anyhow, if you get no one else" (he seemed to take a low view of the probable popularity of our invitation !), "and care to risk it, you can let me know "; and he left it at that.

The more I thought of it, the more the idea smiled to me. Jack has a barely repressed passion for teaching, which does not get an encouraging outlet in the Stock Exchange, and my early enthusiasm for being taught is fading away. So it seemed to me a boy from college would be not only keen