Coristine walked aft to The Crew, and served his apprenticeship to sitting on the tiller and propelling the rudder thereby in the desired direction.  When he went wrong, while The Crew was lighting his pipe, the flapping of the sails warned him to back the tiller to its proper place.  When hauling at the halliards, he had sung to his admiring companion in toil the “Sailor’s Shanty":—­

     My Polly said she’d marry me when I came home,
       Yo hee, yo ho, haul all together;
     But when I came I found she’d been and took my messmate Tom,
       Yo hee, yo ho, haul all together.

Now, therefore, The Crew was urgent for a song to cheer up the lonesomeness a bit, and the lawyer, nothing loath, sang with genuine pathos:—­

                A baby was sleeping;
                Its mother was weeping. 
     For her husband was far on the wide rolling sea.

When he came to the sea-ee-ee-ee-ee at the end of the third line, The Crew, who had been keeping time with one foot on the deck and with one hand on the tiller, aided him in rolling it forth, and, when the singing was over, he characterized it as “pooty and suitin’ like,” by which he meant that the references to the howling tempest and the raging billow were appropriate to the present nautical circumstances.  After much persuasion The Crew was induced to add to the harmony of the evening.  His voice was strong, but, like many strong things, under imperfect control; his tune was nowhere, and his intended pathetic unction was simply maudlin.  Coristine could recall but little of the long ballad to which he listened, the story of a niggardly and irate father, who followed and fought with the young knight that had carried off his daughter.  Two verses, however, could not escape his memory, on account of the disinterested and filial light in which they made the young lady appear:—­

     “O stay your hand,” the old man cried,
     A-lying on the ground,
     “And you shall have my daughter,
     And twenty thousand pound.”

     “Don’t let him up, dear sweetheart,
     The portion is too small.” 
     “O stay your hand,” the old man said,
       “And you shall have it all.”

The lawyer was loud in his admiration of this classical piece, and what he afterwards found was The Crew’s original and only tune.  “That was the kind of wife for a poor man,” remarked Sylvanus, meditatively; “but she was mighty hard on her old dad.”

“They’re a poor lot, the whole pack of them,” said the lawyer, savagely, thinking of the quandary in which he and his friend were placed.

“Who is?” asked The Crew.

“Why, the women, to be sure.”

“Look here, Mister, my name may be Sylvanus, but I know I’m pretty rough, for all that.  But, rough as I am, I don’t sit quiet and let any man, no, not as good friends as you and me has been, say a word agin the wimmen.  When I think o’ these yere gals as was in this blessed schooner last summer, I feel it my juty, bein’ I’m one o’ them as helped to sail her then, to stand up fer all wimmen kind, and, no offence meant.  I guess your own mother’s one o’ the good sort, now wasn’t she?”