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Page 25
"Not as tall as a man, Cousin Peregrine?"
"As tall as many men piled one upon another, Maggie."
"It certainly is very funny that the children should choose this subject
to tease you about tonight, Peregrine," said Mamma.
We are all apt to speak inaccurately. Mamma did not mean that the
subject was a comical one, but that it was remarkable that the children
should have started it at dessert, when the grown-up people had been
discussing it at dinner.
They had not been talking about Robinson Crusoe's wave, but about the
loss of an Australian vessel, in sad circumstances which were in every
one's mouth. A few people only had been saved. They had spent many days
in an open boat in great suffering, and the particular question
discussed at dinner was, whether the captain of a certain vessel which
had passed without rescuing them had been so inhuman as to see and yet
to leave them.
"How could he help seeing them?" Mamma had indignantly asked. "It was
daylight, and of course somebody was on the deck, even if the captain
was still in bed. Don't talk to me, Peregrine! You would say black is
white for the sake of argument, especially if it was to defend somebody.
But little as I know about the sea, I know that it's flat."
"And that's flat!" interposed Papa.
"It's all very well making fun of me," Mamma had continued with
good-humoured vehemence, "but there were no Welsh hills and valleys to
block the view of castaway fellow-creatures not a mile off, and it was
daylight, and he _must_ have seen them."
"I'm not quite sure about the hills and valleys," Cousin Peregrine had
replied; "and hills of water are quite as troublesome to see through as
hills of earth."
At this moment the dining-room door had opened to admit the children,
Maggie coming first, and making her courtesy in the doorway, with the
old fat, brown-calf-bound _Robinson Crusoe_ under her arm. It opened
without the slightest difficulty at the picture of the big wave, and the
children appealed to Cousin Peregrine as has been related.
Maggie was a little taken aback by a decision which was in favour of her
brother's judgment. She was apt to think rather highly of her own, and
even now she pondered, and then put another question--
"But if the waves were so very, very big, Cousin, they would swallow up
the ships!"
"No, Maggie, not if the sailors manage their ship properly, and turn her
about so that she meets the wave in the right way. Then she rides over
it instead of being buried under it."
"It would be dreadful if they didn't!" said Maggie.
"I remember being in a ship that didn't meet one of these waves in the
right way," said Cousin Peregrine.
"Tell us all about it," said Fred, settling himself with two or three
severe fidgets into the seat of his chair.
"I _was_ going to have protested against the children asking you for
another story so soon, Peregrine," said Mamma, "but now I feel selfish,
for your wave-story will be quite as much for me as for the little
ones."
"Where was it, Cousin Peregrine?"
"Where was the wave, do you mean? It was in the great South Seas. As to
where I was, I was in a sailing-vessel bound for South Australia. To
begin at the beginning, I must explain to you that this vessel was one
of those whose captains accepted the instruments offered by the Board of
Trade to any ship that would keep a meteorological log. I was fond of
such matters, and I took the trouble off the captain's hands, by keeping
his meteorological log for him."
"What is a meteorological log, Cousin?"
"A kind of diary, in which you put down the temperature of the sea and
air, how cold or hot they are--the way the wind blows, how the barometer
is, and anything special and interesting about the weather overhead or
the currents in the sea. Now I must tell you that there had been a good
deal of talk about currents of warm water in the Southern Ocean, like
the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, which keeps the west coasts of Great
Britain so warm. But these South Sea currents had not been very
accurately observed, and information on the subject was desired. Well,
one day we got right into a warm current."
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