It was a little past midnight, and, with the wind nearly astern, we were running down Lower San Francisco Bay to Bay Farm Island.  Paul Fairfax and I went to the same school, lived next door to each other, and “chummed it” together.  By saving money, by earning more, and by each of us foregoing a bicycle on his birthday, we had collected the purchase-price of the Mist, a beamy twenty-eight-footer, sloop-rigged, with baby topsail and centerboard.  Paul’s father was a yachtsman himself, and he had conducted the business for us, poking around, overhauling, sticking his penknife into the timbers, and testing the planks with the greatest care.  In fact, it was on his schooner, the Whim, that Paul and I had picked up what we knew about boat-sailing, and now that the Mist was ours, we were hard at work adding to our knowledge.

The Mist, being broad of beam, was comfortable and roomy.  A man could stand upright in the cabin, and what with the stove, cooking-utensils, and bunks, we were good for trips in her of a week at a time.  And we were just starting out on the first of such trips, and it was because it was the first trip that we were sailing by night.  Early in the evening we had beaten out from Oakland, and we were now off the mouth of Alameda Creek, a large salt-water estuary which fills and empties San Leandro Bay.

“Men lived in those days,” Paul said, so suddenly as to startle me from my own thoughts.  “In the days of the sea-kings, I mean,” he explained.

I said “Oh!” sympathetically, and began to whistle “Captain Kidd.”

“Now, I’ve my ideas about things,” Paul went on.  “They talk about romance and adventure and all that, but I say romance and adventure are dead.  We’re too civilized.  We don’t have adventures in the twentieth century.  We go to the circus——­”

“But——­” I strove to interrupt, though he would not listen to me.

“You look here, Bob,” he said.  “In all the time you and I’ve gone together what adventures have we had?  True, we were out in the hills once, and didn’t get back till late at night, and we were good and hungry, but we weren’t even lost.  We knew where we were all the time.  It was only a case of walk.  What I mean is, we’ve never had to fight for our lives.  Understand?  We’ve never had a pistol fired at us, or a cannon, or a sword waving over our heads, or—­or anything....

“You’d better slack away three or four feet of that main-sheet,” he said in a hopeless sort of way, as though it did not matter much anyway.  “The wind’s still veering around.

“Why, in the old times the sea was one constant glorious adventure,” he continued.  “A boy left school and became a midshipman, and in a few weeks was cruising after Spanish galleons or locking yard-arms with a French privateer, or—­doing lots of things.”

“Well—­there are adventures today,” I objected.

But Paul went on as though I had not spoken: