The wind had risen to half a gale, and they had three reefs in the mainsail.  His father, who for some days past had been wandering with increasing frequency up to the flag-staff, or down to the quay, where he would stand with his hand behind his back alone, and look about him in an eager, restless way—­sure signs that he was getting tired of being on land—­had been up several times to look out for the boy, and was now sitting in the house, pasting together an old chart, as his son came up from the quay shouting out the new song at the top of his voice against the wind.  He stopped in the porch to collect his breath to give the last stanza with effect, and husband and wife as they listened exchanged glances.

It was easy to see when he came in that he was bursting with the consciousness of having all sorts of wonderful things to relate.  His mother had just laid the table for their evening meal, and as he greeted them in an off-hand sort of way, he drew a chair over to the table at the same time, that he might be ready to fall to the moment the food was set down.

“Well, Gjert,” said his mother, after he had sat and looked round him for a moment or two, evidently expecting to be invited to gratify their curiosity, “were you on board?”

“Not myself; but I talked to others who had been.  For that matter I saw everything that was to be seen,” he assured them with a self-conscious nod, reaching over at the same time for a crust of bread—­“from the topmast of the Antonia, a schooner that was lying close alongside.  She barely reached up to the Eagle’s bulwarks; she would just about make a long-boat for her—­”

“If she was a good deal smaller,” said his father, drily, completing the sentence for him, as he went over and placed the chart upon the top of the small cupboard in the corner.

Gjert began then, addressing himself to his mother, to support his assertion by a comparison of the height out of the water of the schooner’s hull and of the corvette’s, by assuring her that the vane at her mast-head had not reached higher than the man-of-war’s mainyard, &c., but he was interrupted by his father—­

“What song was that you were singing out there?”

“Oh, it was the one about the flogging cruise.”

“It really was one then?” said the pilot, with a searching look at his son.  He did not easily give credence to gossip of the kind.

To be addressed by his father in this interested tone was highly flattering to Gjert’s self-love.  It was this, in fact, that he had been eager all the time to tell them about; and he burst out now with the deepest conviction in his manner—­

“That it was, father!  Some say six, others nine; but that they were all flogged within an inch of their lives and put in irons down in the Mediterranean is as certain as—­as,” he looked about him eagerly here for something that should be duly emphatic, and when no other more striking illustration suggested itself, had to wind up finally with this rather lame one—­“as that the cuckoo is standing up there on the clock.”