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plane them smooth. He laid out scales, working with a small square and a pair of compasses, and engraved them with utmost care. He wrought brass into curious shapes by a plan he made, and from morning till night he kept at the task, frowning and ciphering and sitting deep in thought. He called for charcoal and a mortar, and beat the charcoal to a fine powder and tempered it with linseed oil. This he rubbed into the wood he had shaped to his liking, and watched it a long while, now and again touching it to try it; then with oil from a phial he had found in a chest in the great cabin he rubbed the wood clean, and there were left in the wood, set off neatly in black, the gradations and figures he had so exactly etched.

Taking his work into the great cabin, he toiled on by lanthorn light until a late hour, and there through the open door men as they passed might see him hunched over the table with his medley of tools about him. But when at last he leaned back and drew a long breath of relief, very serious and very wise, his work was done, and curiously and deftly contrived it was.

On the table before him there lay a cross-staff, a nocturnal and a Gunter’s scale, “with which,” said he, to the Old One, who sat opposite him quietly taking to- bacco and sipping wine, “and with what instruments the thief hath left us, a man can navigate a ship where he will.”

Examining closely the nocturnal, which was intricately carved and engraved, the Old One muttered, as if ignoring Jacob’s words, ‘‘I will yet lime that bird.”

“Though he be never so mad a callant, I misdoubt he will put his head into a noose,” said Jacob in his thick, serious voice.