“It’s no use, lad,” said Captain Ephraim, laying his great red hand upon his shoulder.  “They that go down to the sea in ships need a power of patience, and there’s no good eatin’ your heart out for what you can’t get.”

“There’s a feel of home about the air, though,” Amos answered.  “It seems to whistle through your teeth with a bite to it that I never felt over yonder.  Ah, it will take three months of the Mohawk Valley before I feel myself to rights.”

“Well,” said his friend, thrusting a plug of Trinidado tobacco into the corner of his cheek, “I’ve been on the sea since I had hair to my face, mostly in the coast trade, d’ye see, but over the water as well, as far as those navigation laws would let me.  Except the two years that I came ashore for the King Philip business, when every man that could carry a gun was needed on the border, I’ve never been three casts of a biscuit from salt water, and I tell you that I never knew a better crossing than the one we have just made.”

“Ay, we have come along like a buck before a forest fire.  But it is strange to me how you find your way so clearly out here with never track nor trail to guide you.  It would puzzle me, Ephraim, to find America, to say nought of the Narrows of New York.”

“I am somewhat too far to the north, Amos.  We have been on or about the fiftieth since we sighted Cape La Hague.  To-morrow we should make land, by my reckonin’.”

“Ah, to-morrow!  And what will it be?  Mount Desert?  Cape Cod?  Long Island?”

“Nay, lad, we are in the latitude of the St. Lawrence, and are more like to see the Arcadia coast.  Then with this wind a day should carry us south, or two at the most.  A few more such voyages and I shall buy myself a fair brick house in Green Lane of North Boston, where I can look down on the bay, or on the Charles or the Mystic, and see the ships comin’ and goin’.  So I would end my life in peace and quiet.”

All day Amos Green, in spite of his friend’s assurance, strained his eyes in the fruitless search for land, and when at last the darkness fell he went below and laid out his fringed hunting tunic, his leather gaiters, and his raccoon-skin cap, which were very much more to his taste than the broadcloth coat in which the Dutch mercer of New York had clad him.  De Catinat had also put on the dark coat of civil life, and he and Adele were busy preparing all things for the old man, who had fallen so weak that there was little which he could do for himself.  A fiddle was screaming in the forecastle, and half the night through hoarse bursts of homely song mingled with the dash of the waves and the whistle of the wind, as the New England men in their own grave and stolid fashion made merry over their home-coming.