Chapter 6

The Juno arrived in due course at Boston, where Salvé invested a
considerable portion of his wages in the material for a dress, a couple
of silk handkerchiefs, and two massive rings with his own and
Elizabeth's initials on them.

From Boston she proceeded to Grimsby with a Canadian cargo; then on a
short trip to Liverpool; then back to Quebec; and some ten or eleven
months after leaving Arendal, they were on a voyage from Memel in the
Baltic to New York, with a cargo of timber, planks, and pipe-staves--the
intention being to call in at the home port, for which she had some
general cargo, to take in provisions.

During these voyages Salvé, as one may say, had completed his
apprenticeship to the sea; and in his blue shirt loosely knotted round
the throat, his leather belt and canvas trousers, he had such a look of
smartness and energy that it required no very great amount of
discernment to perceive in him a sailor from top to toe. He had, sooner
than most, risen superior to the dangers and temptations to which young
sailor lads are exposed during the years of their novitiate, and with a
break-neck recklessness of disposition he combined such a perfectly
cat-like activity, that his superior smartness was recognised even among
his comrades. His bearing, it is true, was rather arrogant, and his
tongue not the most good-natured; but he was generally liked
nevertheless, for he was kind-hearted, if he was only taken on the right
side, and it did not seem to be his sailor-like qualities upon which he
prided himself so much as upon the superior acuteness of his
understanding, which he delighted to display in discussions with the
red-bearded and somewhat consequential sailmaker, who had the reputation
of being a well-read man, and who affected a proportionate importance.

Up at Memel they had had great difficulties to contend with, owing to
the condition of the ice; and their bad luck seemed to be going to
follow them, for in the Skager Rack they found themselves suddenly
wedged into a field of drift-ice, with the prospect of having to remain
where they were for weeks perhaps. The cold had been unusually severe
that winter in the Baltic, and out over the plain of ice by which they
were surrounded they could see flags of all nations sharing a similar
fate. There was nothing for it but to wait and hope; and if the ice did
not break up soon, short rations would become the order of the day.

It was wearisome; and to Salvé above all, who was feverishly longing to
get home, and whose temperament was little suited for the endurance of
such agonies of Tantalus. He became the very embodiment of restlessness.
A hundred times a-day he went aloft to look out for some prospect of a
change, and to