We might go up in their spray if we reached the rocks, but no anchor could check our crawling to doom.

To this day I look back with surprise at the complete freedom, not from fright, but even from a recognition of any real danger impending over us, which I then felt; it was not courage, but a something stronger than myself or my own weakness; it was not even a superstitious faith that I should be preserved from the threatened peril, but a profound and immovable conviction that the danger was not real; and the whole thing was to me simply a magnificent spectacle, in which the apprehension of my shipmates rather perplexed than unnerved me.
In half an hour more, the captain said, our margin of safety would be passed,--drifting as we then drifted our stern would try conclusions with the cliffs of Cephalonia.

The sun was going down in a wild and lurid sky, a few fragments of clouds still flying from the west, when, almost as the sun touched the horizon, there came a lull; the wind went out as it had come on, died away utterly, and as we got our bows round for Argostoli we could hear the roar of the great waves that broke against the cliffs, and could see in the afterglow the tall breakers mounting up against them.

In ten minutes we were going with all the steam it was safe to carry for Argostoli, where we ran in with the late stars coming out, and our engineers broke out into festive exuberance of spirits as we sat down to dine together at anchor in the tranquil waters of that magnificent port, where the Argonauts had taken refuge long before us.

Blair shook his head at my rallying him, as he said in his broad Scotch tongue, "Ah, but no man of us expected ever to see his wife and bairns again; that I can assure ye." We were again indebted to private courtesy for a trip from Syra to Canea, though the delay was long.