For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said, “things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep.”  There is not much gear to a seventy-ton schooner with a stump-foremast, but Long Jack had a gift of expression.  When he wished to draw Harvey’s attention to the peak-halyards, he dug his knuckles into the back of the boy’s neck and kept him at gaze for half a minute.  He emphasized the difference between fore and aft generally by rubbing Harvey’s nose along a few feet of the boom, and the lead of each rope was fixed in Harvey’s mind by the end of the rope itself.

The lesson would have been easier had the deck been at all free; but there appeared to be a place on it for everything and anything except a man.  Forward lay the windlass and its tackle, with the chain and hemp cables, all very unpleasant to trip over; the foc’sle stovepipe, and the gurry-butts by the foc’sle hatch to hold the fish-livers.  Aft of these the foreboom and booby of the main-hatch took all the space that was not needed for the pumps and dressing-pens.  Then came the nests of dories lashed to ring-bolts by the quarter-deck; the house, with tubs and oddments lashed all around it; and, last, the sixty-foot main-boom in its crutch, splitting things length-wise, to duck and dodge under every time.

Tom Platt, of course, could not keep his oar out of the business, but ranged alongside with enormous and unnecessary descriptions of sails and spars on the old Ohio.

“Niver mind fwhat he says; attind to me, Innocince.  Tom Platt, this bally-hoo’s not the Ohio, an’ you’re mixing the bhoy bad.”

“He’ll be ruined for life, beginnin’ on a fore-an’-after this way,” Tom Platt pleaded.  “Give him a chance to know a few leadin’ principles.  Sailin’s an art, Harvey, as I’d show you if I had ye in the fore-top o’ the—­”

“I know ut.  Ye’d talk him dead an’ cowld.  Silince, Tom Platt!  Now, after all I’ve said, how’d you reef the foresail, Harve?  Take your time answerin’.”

“Haul that in,” said Harvey, pointing to leeward.

“Fwhat?  The North Atlantuc?”

“No, the boom.  Then run that rope you showed me back there—­”

“That’s no way,” Tom Platt burst in.

“Quiet!  He’s larnin’, an’ has not the names good yet.  Go on, Harve.”

“Oh, it’s the reef-pennant.  I’d hook the tackle on to the reef-pennant, and then let down—­”

“Lower the sail, child!  Lower!” said Tom Platt, in a professional agony.

“Lower the throat and peak halyards,” Harvey went on.  Those names stuck in his head.

“Lay your hand on thim,” said Long Jack.

Harvey obeyed.  “Lower till that rope-loop—­on the after-leach-kris—­no, it’s cringle—­till the cringle was down on the boom.  Then I’d tie her up the way you said, and then I’d hoist up the peak and throat halyards again.”