The crews at length began to murmur a little; they were weary of painting and polishing the cabins, and of rowing the captains to and from the toddy suppers.  It was rumoured that individual ships were getting ready for sailing.  The sails of some were set one by one in all silence, the anchors were weighed without song, and the ships glided quietly out of the harbour; others sailed while their captains slept.  Fighting and mutiny were also heard of; but then there came help from the neighbour captains, the malcontents were punished and put ashore, and all moorings were carefully examined and strengthened.

Nevertheless, all the ships, except one, at last left the harbour.  They did not all sail with like fortune; one and another even came in again for a time, damaged.  Others were little heard of.  The captain of one ship, it was said, was thrown overboard by his men; another sailed with half the crew in irons, none knew where.  But yet they were all in motion, each striving after its own fashion, now in storm, now in calm, towards its goal.

As stated, only one ship remained in the harbour, and it lay safe and sound, with two anchors at the bottom and three great cables attached to the quay.

It was a strange little craft.  The hull was old, but it had been newly repaired, and they had given it a smart little modern figurehead, which contrasted strangely with the smooth sides and the heavy stern.  One could see that the rigging had originally belonged to a large vessel, but had been very hastily adapted to the smaller hull, and this still further increased the want of proportion in the brig’s whole appearance.  Then it was painted with large portholes for guns, like a man-of-war, and always carried its flag at the main-mast.

The skipper was no common man.  He himself had painted the sketch of the brig that hung in the cabin, and, besides, he could sing—­both psalms and songs.  Indeed, there were those who maintained that he composed the songs himself; but this was most probably a lie.  And it was certainly a lie that they whispered in the forecastle:  that the skipper had not quite got his sea-legs.  Young men always tell such stories to cabin-boys, in order to appear manly.  And, besides, there was a steersman on the brig, who could, on a pinch, easily round the headlands alone.

He had sailed as steersman for many years of our Lord, ever since the time of the skipper’s late father.  He had become as if glued to the tiller, and many could scarcely imagine the old brig with a new steersman.

He had certainly never voyaged in distant waters; but as his trade had always been the same, and as he had invariably been in the company of others, the brig had sailed pretty fortunately, without special damage and without special merit.

Therefore, both he and the skipper had arrived at the conviction that none could sail better than they, and hence they cared little what the others did.  They looked up at the sky and shook their heads.