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By Root 4541 0

who were to get Bibles that day, quickly jumped forward, caught Jerusha by the arms and carried her below. Abner, infuriated at the disruption of his charge to the sailors, concluded his sermon in rather a jumble, and turned the prayer over to an associate. He was confused and angry, because he had arranged the entire service so that it would end dramatically with his presentatation of the Bibles to Cridland and his friend, thus symbolically welcoming them into the Lord's family, but when the time had come to do this, those two were below decks, and Abner was painfully aware that his first major effort had ended like that of so many ministers: looking for a logical place to stop. Finally he had just quit.

When service ended, members of the family made a pretense of commending Abner for his sermon, but both the extenders of congratulations and the recipient knew that they were hollow. In an unruly fit of temper and disappointment, Abner started to go below, but he was met at the top of the hatchway by Cridland and Mason, who reported, "Your wife is very sick, sir."

"Thank you," he replied curtly.

"The minister who got sick first is helping her," Cridland said.

Abner started down but Mason stopped him and asked, "Have you our Bibles, sir?"

"Next week," Abner snapped, and was gone. But when he saw his wife, and how ashen white she was, he forgot his own problems and fetched water to wash her perspiring face.

"I'm sorry, my cherished partner," she said wanly. "I'll never make a sailor."

"We'll get you above decks just a few minutes each day," he said reassuringly, but even the thought of facing that slanting deck again brought back her nausea, and she said, "I'm going to weigh even less than Captain Janders predicted."

At noon, when the day's big meal was served, Janders saw with pleasure that seventeen of his passengers were at last able to eat. "On each trip," he observed, "as we approach Cape Verde, our sick ones get better."

"Shall we be stopping at the islands?" John Whipple asked.

"Yes, if weather permits." The news was so good that Abner rose from his pork-and-suet pudding and called into any staterooms where sick missionaries lay, "We'll soon be touching at Cape Verde. Then you can walk about on land and get fresh fruit."

"By the way, Reverend Hale," the captain added, "that was a good sermon you preached today. There is indeed a heritage that the Lord provides those who serve Him, and may we all come into it." The missionaries nodded their approval of this sentiment, whereupon Janders launched his harpoon: "Seems to me your message got a little tangled up at the end."

Since all knew this to be true, they looked at their plates and thought: "Our captain is a clever man." But Abner looked at him boldly and said, "I count a sermon a success if it contains one good Christian thought in it."

"I do too," Janders said heartily. "Yours had several."

"I hope we can all take them to mind," Abner said piously, but secretly he wished that services could have ended as planned. Then the ship would have heard a sermon.

After lunch Captain Janders invited the missionaries to tour the ship with him, and John Whipple asked, "I don't understand why, if we're bound west for Hawaii, we sail east almost to the coast of Africa."

"Mister Collins, break us out a chart!" And Janders showed the surprised missionaries how it was that ships wanting to double Cape Horn sailed from Boston on a heading which took them not south for the Horn but far to the east, almost to the coast of Africa. "It's so that when we finally turn south for the Horn, we can run in one straight line, down past Brazil and Argentina, straight on to Tierra del^Fuego," Janders explained, and the chart made this clear.

^'Are the Cape Verde islands pleasant?" Whipple asked.

"You watch! Some of our boys jump ship there on every trip. We'll be leaving Verde with a couple of Brava boys as replacements."

While the captain was explaining these things, Abner was on another part of the deck talking seriously with Cridland and Mason, "I did not give you your Bibles