turned POLLYWOG's nose landward toward a villainous-looking line of breakers fronting a smooth channel. We could not, it seemed, make the next inlet-a good onebefore dark, so must run New River, about which Captain Ned was wisely silent.

We circled in shoal water, waiting for a "ledge" of three high seas to pass, and rolled till frightened Viola made sure we should be rolled over. Then Captain Ned headed her straight for the fifty-foot channel with its scant four feet of boiling surf and drove her at it. She took the bit at the top of a comber and shot inshore straight as an arrow. The wave dropped her, and another took her, but caught her on the quarter so that she yawed sharply off the course, to bump viciously across a hundred feet of boiling bar into still anchorage.

We were laughing over the misadventure half an hour later, but Captain Ned took it much to heart. It was his first grounding at an inlet, and after that night he refused to speak of it, though he often cautioned:

"A feller don't want to be messin' around these inlets."

But Captain Ned had saved us from a worse experience. An hour after we had crossed New River bar the sea outside was fairly raging, and that night came a gale which took its toll of big shipping all the way to the British Isles and, by virtue of a fouled anchor-fluke, landed us high on a hard sand-bank well above the reach of any ordinary tide, and miles from human habitation.

It took four days of steady spading to get POLLYWOG afloat again. Captain Ned reckoned that we three shoveled thirty tons of sticky sand from under and around her, and he did about half of that himself, which is not part of a pilot's duty. But we laughed while we ached and compared blisters, and Viola watched with growing alarm the melting of the stores under our onslaughts.

A week passed before we dared try to run out of the inlet, and then the sea proved rougher than it had looked. We had to fight our way out and sloshed about in alarming fashion. Viola was more terrified than ever and the wind was veering into the eastward. So Captain Ned turned back and in we drove again-this time, by some miracle, keeping to the channel.

But the adventure had taken our nerve. POLLYWOG was obviously underpowered for the work. There was danger at that sea

son.

And Captain Ned was overdue in Beaufort. There is an uncertain inside passage back, and he was willing to try it.

With an ache in my throat I gave the word, and the cruise of the POLLYWOG was abandoned. We were turning back. It hurt. . . .

Two days later we were buying ice-cream sodas and borrowing old newspapers in Beaufort, where the water-front had about decided to report us missing. We liked Beaufort-after the marshes-and tried to decide upon it as our winter residence. Here I was to settle down to work, accepting my defeat.

But all the time I was saying to myself that there was a way to go on, even for POLLYWOG, and that waiting would find it.

At the end of a week a way had been found. Viola was to go on by rail, and Captain Ned's powerful little work-boat would tow POLLYWOG down the coast. The unexpected expense had been miraculously provided for, which seemed assurance from Destiny that we were meant to complete this thing we had set out to do.

On the second sally from Beaufort the saucy Violet Keith led us, at the end of our anchor cable, down inside to the first inlet, where we encountered the Pelican, a pilotless thirty-five-footer also southward bound, which had been waiting a month for weather. Without delay we three cut cleanly out to sea, a rollicking trio that did not mind the rather heavy swell in the least.

All day we rolled absurdly down that long, wearisome beach and at the end of hungry hours pulled through the strange, surf-banked sea-lane called Cape Fear Slue that saves a fifty-mile seaward detour around dread Frying Pan Shoal. Before dark we had tied up thankfully under Southport's ancient arsenal and were ruthlessly pursuing a sign marked "Restaurant."

POLLYWOG and Pelican faced the remaining ninety miles of coasting without Captain Ned and his boat. Little River Inlet, thirty miles from Southport, is deep and well-buoyed. For the rest we must pick our day and race for it to Georgetown jetty. And Pelican would give POLLYWOG a line, thus adding a knot to our speed.

We started at four on a breathless morning to try for a through run, but weather drove us back six miles to Little River. An

other wait and another early start, and this time we did not turn back, though the sky gave tardy warning of brewing trouble.

At dusk the two boats were still five miles from the jetty. The unlighted cairn at the end came into dim view far out from shore just before night closed down. A strong tide was against us, swinging up the coast from Winyah Bay's powerful ebb; the swell was piled into an ugly chop under us by shoal water, and half a gale was blowing.

But it was blowing off shore-thank Heaven, it was blowing off shore!

The one thing to be done was to round the invisible end of that unlighted North Jetty close in. Captain Sam, out ahead in his Pelican, took compass course just before the light faded, and for one full high-tension hour he felt his way through black and howling night, while I fought wearily to keep POLLYWOG'S plunging bow headed for his stern light.

At the end of the hour the rock cairn, barely visible at a hundred feet, was close to starboard. In all that wild, wide smother of inky sea Captain Sam had picked the right spot within a boatlength. It was a brilliant piece of seamanship.

A few minutes later the following swell was flattening out as we ran up inside the jetty. We waved tired and derisive farewells to Old Atlantic and almost sobbed with weariness and relief.

POLLYWOG left the sea just one month from the day she reached it at Beaufort. All of January was consumed in making 190 miles of southward progress, and this involved an actual mileage of

275. But runs were made on only seven days, and the final trip from Beaufort to Georgetown occupied only eleven days.

Now the open sea was past, the strain of strife was over and peaceful Georgetown invited us to linger. And still we hurried forward, for bigger Charleston was but two or three days' journey ahead.

By miniature canal out of Winyah Bay one enters the great rice district of the South Carolina coast-the Santee River country-at this season deserted by all but the ricebirds. We cut across strange, shoal bays of the sea where you feel the swell in four or five feet of water behind an intricate fortification of sandbars, thence into more winding tidal rivers among the dull-toned, level marsh-lands. In two days we saw not a living soul till we skirted Charleston's lovely Isle of BEAUFORT Palms and sighted at dusk the awaking lights of the city.

PAMLYCO

SOUND

C.FEAR

S.C

CHARLESTON

SAVANNAH

Charleston and mail!

One comes to both the city and letters with zest after many days in the big marshes and on the open sea. Here in a handful of disfigured envelopes is the very touch of all our personal world.

Is this not the test of the perfect vagabond: that he should go out on the open road drawn forward only by the promise of the unknown, without desire to bring the past with him or to meet it on ahead? Then I confess at once my imperfection. Many times I found myself driving POLLYWOG forward not under the lure of strange cities but to the promise of waiting mail -to what the new city would bring me from my own.

A weak-kneed vagabondage, that!

But POLLYWOG went on again, traveling alone after three weeks of company and rather liking the quiet of her untroubled progress. That strange strip of intersected marsh, which, beginning near Beaufort, lies back of the ocean beach all the way to southern Florida, was still our path and would be for many days. No day in it was quite dull aboard POLLYWOG, but there was nothing that wooed us from a daily run. Following always the dotted red line on the Government's

Oh, fallen vagabonds!

We lingered over the courses ecstatically and said "one" to the waiter's poised sugar-tongs as if it had been a rite. We found new excellences of flavor in our ship's humble cigars over the demi-tasse of town, and the cocktail inquiry at the beginning had somehow shed a radiance of romance over all the proceedings.

special "Inside Route" charts, we went up rivers far inland, crossed to others by narrow, winding creeks, and so down again to face the sea across the inlet bars, then, skirting the dunes a space, repeated the whole maneuver in endless variation.

After four days we entered the muddy Savannah River, but, instead of going up to the city, crossed in sight of it and went on down the Wilmington by a pleasant, wooded shore to a village along the bankthe suburb, Thunderbolt.

POLLYWOG arrived lunchless and late, so was quickly tied to a dock and deserted in the direction indicated by a tarry native thumb for restaurant. The next clear memory I have is of a uniformed waiter who, pad in hand, was asking us if we would have cocktails, sir.

Let me say at once that I have no special devotion to the cocktail, but the suggestion came as something profoundly engaging and symbolic. It brought to ragged amateur vagabonds the flavor of gay crowds and the color of silken candle-shades.

A hundred yards from POLLYWOG's nose the empty marsh began again, and it is nearly a hundred miles to the next town.

A day's journey out of Thunderbolt we were hailed by an alert little man in a small boat. He had a close-cropped gray mustache and city clothes. He was taking his thirty-five footer from Savannah to Florida and its rudder gear was smashed beyond mending.

POLLYWOG having rudder for two and he having eighteen available horse-power, a profitable combination at once suggested itself.

SO POLLYWOG adopted a baby sister. An hour after the first encounter we ranged alongside smart little Gallivant, in a blow with a plunging chop running, and got her in leash fore and aft and both under way, the little one bobbing happily under POLLYWoG's broad, high side-did it all before any one had time to realize what a smart bit of seamanship it was.

So off we went together, the little man's wife finding unexpected comfort by POLLYWOG's blazing fireplace, and thus the two boats traveled side by side for many days.

Running a fabulous eight miles an houra speed that required a readjustment of the amateur navigator's entire nautical perspective we reached Brunswick, Georgia, and a repair-shop on the third morning, and the Gallivanters had not yet ceased plying POLLYWOG with wonderful things to eat, under a wild but agreeable fancy that the obligation was on their side.

Together we entered Florida next day, to spend the night at Fernandina, where POLLYWOG's log recorded a total mileage of 1,225. The seamanlike time for a POLLYWOG to have made this distance from New York in would be about thirty days. Our actual time was ninety.

But we were in Florida at last. We felt it in the soft, sweet air of the evening as the sun set behind the rigging of the lumber windjammers anchored in the stream

and lighted the old red fort at the sea en

trance.

But we failed to find in the looks of this Florida anything that at all suggested the Florida we had come seeking-that palmdecorated paradise so exquisitely depicted in the railway advertisements. So on we went to thirty miles of navigation intricate and exciting beyond anything we had ever guessed.

With twenty-five feet of beam and Gallivant's extra foot of draft to remember, we threaded a maze among the herds of little marsh islands in "The Cow Pen," dodged unheralded oyster-bars in Sister Creek at slow speed all day, and were only two hours late at the St. Johns River, having grounded but four times. Better men than we have thrashed around in that confounding place, prisoners for a week, and the local pilots allowed us three days with luck. We had the luck.

Bucking the tide up the broad St. Johns through the first of the floating water

hyacinths to Jacksonville, we found a very active and very Northern modern metropolis, with still hardly a hint of the tropical Florida we had hoped for except the wonder of warm, sweet weather. So we promptly restocked and began a pilgrimage to find that Florida.

No sooner had we gone from the St. Johns into the canal that takes one down the eastern coast of the great peninsula than Florida disappeared.

A whimsical prank of Nature did it. She sent thick fog in from the sea, and the tall pines and palmettos grew spectral and vanished, leaving us in a limitless world of empty, silent marsh.

We followed the winding, creek - like course timidly into a dim, white world till late afternoon, when a highway bridge loomed out of the fog ahead.

The aged bridge-tender came from a dull spot in the fog to set his little red flags and, with bent shoulders, wind his great lever.

A white road melted into the deepening grayness on either hand. It was dusk.

We tethered POLLYWOG close to the bridge and added our riding light to the dull red warnings of the closed draw.

The frogs in the still marshes set up their chorus, the bridge-tender hobbled away to a dim light in the gloom, and it was nightsweet, thick night in a wide, unguessable wilderness.

Twin white bright lights burned through the fog at us. Came a whizzing roar, a rattle of bridge planks, and a hoarse "honk!" Wilderness indeed! They are not so easy to find in Florida.

From miles of marsh next day the dug channel led us inland to a crooked, sluggish river bordered by a real sub-tropical swamp blazing with strange blossoms. Then it

bent back to the beach and St. Augustine with its authentically medieval fortress, its gay modern towers among the high palms, and its rows of fishing Northerners on every wharf. Here indeed was the Florida of our dreams.

And here at last we lingered contentedly. POLLYWOG and Gallivant tailed to a dock side by side. Old friends of the long trail greeted us gaily. Some of them had gone on to that Mecca of the yachtsman, Miami, where the Northern fleet were assembled, and were already working their way back.

They all accorded POLLYWOG unaccustomed respect-she had won her spurs. Her uncouth figure mattered no longer. The smart yachts treated her almost as an equal.

But the return-trippers from Indiana, Kansas, and Vermont, who manned the piazzas, would have their little laugh. Bless them! We liked that, too.

When charming but sadly commercialized St. Augustine had become familiar we moved lazily southward, Gallivant still at our side.

Through more miles of marsh-banked river behind the long sand ramparts of the sea to the wonderful, ruined Spanish fort at Matanzas Inlet was a magical morning's run, and the afternoon took us by palmbordered canal into a veritable wilderness, to tie to a grassy bank. The only lights that night were the fireflies among the palms. The only sounds were the splashings of little fish, the whir and chirp of fiddling grasshoppers and crickets, and now and then the high, throaty gurgle of alligators.

The broad and infamous Halifax River, with its two feet of water and six feet of soft ooze, its inscrutable channel, and invisible but perceptible hummocks carried us uncertainly past Ormond to Daytona.

Here we encountered the winter - resort industry in its most virulent form, and made an excursion out of vagabondage to dine at one of the big hotels that front the ocean beach. It was a brightly lighted place, and all the guests were very well dressed to express prosperity. The Pollywoggers were quite dazzled for a while but, escaping, climbed their shrine's high side and resumed the garments of vagabondage in vast content. In the waiting steamer-chairs we had all the loveliness those others had, and more. Their shore lights shone for us as cheerfully; their imported band played for us as gaily across the water; and all the sweetness of the gentle night was ours in a way they could not know.

The South still called, and we answered, and the South gave us our perfect day.

Your cruising vagabond leaves the North with fond dreams of a lazy life afloat in a sun-kissed paradise.

Quickly the dream fades. Anchors drag, supplies run short, shoals get in one's way, seas stay high, channels change, buoys disappear. He reaches Florida in a chilly norther and fails to find it; navigating grows