ears, and getting to windward to do that, moreover, and so I looked
round to see if there was any change coming. But all was grey overhead,
and a grey wall of rain and flying drift from the wave tops was all
round us, blotting out all things that were half a mile from us, if
there were anything to be blotted out. It always seems as if there must
be somewhat beyond a thickness of any sort at sea. But there was one
thing that I did notice, and that was that the sea was no longer grey,
as it had been yesterday, but was browner against the cold sky, while
the foam of the following wave crests was surely not so white as it had
been, and at this I wondered.

Then I crawled aft and went to my father and asked him what he thought
of the wind and the chance of its dropping. He had had the lead going
for long now.

"We are right off the Humber mouth, to judge by the colour of the
water," he told me, "or else off the Wash, which is more to the south. I
cannot tell which rightly, for we have run far, and maybe faster than I
know. If only one could see--"

There he stopped, and I knew enough to understand that we were in some
peril unless a shift of wind came very soon, since the shore was under
our lee now, if by good luck we were not carried straight into the great
river itself. So for an hour or more I watched, and all the time it
seemed that hope grew less, for the sea grew shorter, as if against
tide, and ever its colour was browner with the mud of the Trent and her
sisters.

Presently, as I clung to the rail, there seemed to grow a new sound over
and amid all those to which I had become used--as it were a low