Her ways are not as the ways of other women, and all her ways are
delightful to me. In the end, I suppose, I shall become a nest-
builder, for of a surety nest-building is one of her pretty ways.
And who shall say which is the worthier--the writing of a whole
library or the building of a nest?
The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by. It is
now a month since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are,
not so well forward as a month ago, because we are something like a
hundred miles south of the Straits of Le Maire. Even this position
is conjectural, being arrived at by dead reckoning, based on the
leeway of a ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on the other, with
always the Great West Wind Drift making against us. It is four days
since our last instrument-sight of the sun.
This storm-vexed ocean has become populous. No ships are getting
round, and each day adds to our number. Never a brief day passes
without our sighting from two or three to a dozen hove-to on port
tack or starboard tack.
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