Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/759

1885.] is the worst thing in the world for you. We should say it had set in for settled wet in the south. Believe me, you had much better go below."

"But I am half suffocated already, Willis, and those good gentlemen seem to have no notion of going to bed."

"Better be half smothered or half stunned, sir, than suffer pain for weeks to come," answered Willis, sententiously. "The one will be soon over; but who can tell the end of the other?"

So his master yielded to reason, and descended again to the Inferno, where his worst anticipations were fully realised. If the practice of patience be the discipline of life, Winstanley should have passed a profitable night.

When he crept on to the deck in the morning, he felt a doubly injured man. In his sense of intense feverishness it seemed as if he were suffering vicariously for the indulgences of his shipmates – as if he had swallowed the contents of the punch-bowls, while they had been simply looking on. But he revived in the freshness of the morning air, as he feasted his eyes on a magnificent Highland panorama. The Cuchullin was lying at anchor in the land-locked roadstead of Loch Rona. A thick undergrowth of dwarf oaks and alders, interlacing their boughs in great beds of bracken, came literally down to the beach of shingle; half-a-dozen streams were descending so many picturesque glens, breaking here and there over tiny waterfalls; while huge hills, with slopes of the softest green, and great shoulders draped in purple heather, were backed up by the splintered and weather-worn peaks that were partially veiled in the swirl of a drifting cloudland. In the foreground, near a little "change-house" (Anglicè, public-house) and a cluster of hovels, was a snug shooting-box, with its garden washed by the sea- waves, where the luxuriance of the shrubs and the flower-beds glorified the warmth of the Gulf-stream.

"The boat will be going ashore, sir, after breakfast, should you think well of that," said the shock-headed steward very civilly; and Winstanley thanked him as civilly and declined, although, to a man in his situation, the proposal sounded seductively. He would have liked nothing better than a temporary escape from his floating purgatory; but he was reconciled to his fate in remaining on board, when the sprightly American came up with his greeting.

"I calculate, Colonel, by the way you're sniffing the mountain air, you feel as fresh this morning as a four-year-old mustang. And if you're good for a run ashore, I'll come along and kinder take care o' you. No? You won't? Wai, then, if you like a hobble better, you're welcome to try one. Them rocks up there may be almighty grand, but I'd sooner spekilate on their tallness any day than climb them."

The morning passed slowly enough while the Cuchullin was leisurely landing cargo. The captain smoked and sipped his whisky-and-water, leaving the superintendence of operations to his mate. Winstanley, after sundry unsuccessful attempts to kill time, gave himself over to reflections that were exceedingly unpleasant. He was condemned to two other days and nights of confinement in his present society before being landed at a Christian port in the Clyde. He made up his mind to the inevitable, in the spirit of an early martyr.

And the inevitable promised to be worse than he imagined. As