“He has left his wife in Greenland, perhaps,” said Rory, “and is going, like ourselves, to seek his fortune in the far west.”
“I wonder if he’ll find her when he returns.”
“Yes, I wonder that; for she can’t remain in the same place all the time, can she?”
“Now, boys,” said Allan, “you see what a wide, wide world of water is all around us—we must be nearly a thousand miles from land. How, if a Great Power did not guide them, could mighty fishes like that find their way about?”
“Suppose that whale had a wife,” said Ralph, “as Rory imagines, and they were journeying across this great ocean together, and supposing they lost sight of each other for a few minutes only, does it not seem probable they might swim about for forty or fifty years yet never meet again?”
“Oh, how vast the ocean is!” said Rory, almost solemnly. “I never felt it so before.”
“And yet,” said Allan, “there is One who can hold it in the hollow of His hand?”
“Watch, shorten sail.”
McBain had come on deck and given the order.
“The glass is going down,” he said to Allan, “and I don’t half like the look of the sea nor the whistle of the wind. We’ll have a dirty night, depend upon it.”