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become accustomed to the pitching and tossing of the ship, even seasickness no longer bothered her.
    On May Day, during a great storm and cold, Phebe helped a frantic mother tend her sick child in the great cabin, and while she wiped the little girl’s swollen blue lips, she mentioned hesitantly the lemons. “I don’t know if they do good, but Mark thinks so and we
have
kept well.”
    Mrs. Bagby had also been tending the child, and now she hooked her fat arm around the upright of a bunk to keep her feet on the lurching floor, and said scornfully, “Lemons, forsooth! You think the child doesn’t suffer enough already, Mistress Honeywood, that you must parch her poor mouth. Give her beer, Goody Carson, beer and wormwood. That’ll help her.”
    And Goody Carson listened to the midwife who was a determined woman of reputed skill, for Goody Carson was big with child, and near to term, and she feared that she would need Mrs. Bagby’s good will before the journey was over.
    Phebe said nothing more. She was unsure herself if those shriveling little fruits were contributing to their health, but each morning before they pulled themselves out of the damp, moldering bunk straw, Mark split two lemons with his hunting knife, and they sucked and swallowed the bitter pulp.
    The journey went on, and the weeks went by. Long since, the memory of home had faded to a haze as unreal as the impossible visioning of the future scene. Nobody thought of either. The ship life alone was true, and its incidents the only interest. Bad food, increasingly scanty, bad weather, bad smells, bad air and bitter cold. These made the dun thread on which the days slid by, but now and then it seemed to knot itself and pause for a more vivid pattern. There was the Sabbath service, held on deck if the weather permitted or, as it usually did not, in the great cabin, smoky from the cook fire and stinking from some fifty unwashed bodies. On the
Jewell
there was no ordained minister, but a godly little clerk, Master Wenn, from Norwich, made shift to read the Bible, lead the prayers, and even preach. Mark always escaped the services, being welcomed by the sailors where he listened to sea lore instead. But Phebe perforce listened with the other passengers, and was much irritated by the canting nasal voice. She missed the candles and the rituals and prayers to which she was accustomed, and found Master Wenn’s bald manner of exhorting God shocking in its crudeness. But this and many other matters she kept to herself.
    In mid-Atlantic a sailor died, one who had been incessantly drunk and blasphemous, and many thought it a judgment on him and were pleased.
    It was a matter of comfort, too, that usually they were in sight of the other ships, the
Arbella
and the
Ambrose,
though the
Talbot
had disappeared after they left the Scillys. Phebe would sometimes push her way to one of the square portholes in the great cabin, and gaze across the heaving gray waters to the
Arbella,
thinking of the beautiful lady for whom the ship was named and wondering how she endured the hardships. It seemed that the ships made no progress, gales and storms followed each other; the passengers, forbidden the deck for fear of the pounding waves, became some quarrelsome, some apathetic.
    On Thursday the twenty-seventh of May came a day of special trial. They had been seven weeks in the open sea; all night a stiff gale had harried them. The little
Jewell
climbed the mountainous waves, shivering as if in fear at the summit, then pitching down to drive her prow a fathom through green water. All night Phebe had clung to Mark, while his long legs braced against the sides of their bunk, and at dawn they dragged themselves to the great cabin for food, both bruised and dizzy. The glum faces of the few passengers who were on their feet announced a new disaster. The beer had given out. Nothing to drink but the slimy, fetid water which all knew was unwholesome. “We must ask Captain Hurlston to broach us a