THE BEGINNING OF THE VOYAGE

It was a lucky thing that the “Hoppergrass” was a large boat.  When we started there were only four of us,—­counting Captain Bannister.  But we kept picking up passengers—­unexpected ones—­ until the Captain said “we’d have the whole County on board.”  It was not as bad as that, but we were glad before we came home again, that we had a comfortable cabin, with plenty of sleeping room.

She was a big, white cat-boat, with her name in gilt letters on the stern.  On the day when our voyage began she lay quietly at anchor, well out toward the middle of the river.  It was still early,—­shortly after five of a morning in July.  The river was quiet, with only one or two boats moving,—­as quiet as the streets of the town through which we had walked on our way to the wharf.  There had been a shower just before daylight, and this had discouraged us a little, but now the sun was coming through the clouds, and there were white spirals of mist rising from the water.  Across the river, on Fisher’s Island, two or three men were moving about their dories, and smoke poured steadily from the chimneys of the houses.  A man’s head looked out of the cabin of the “Hoppergrass.”

“There’s someone on board her,” said Jimmy Toppan.

“Yes,” replied Captain Bannister, “it’s Clarence.  He’s havin’ some breakfast, I guess.  He helped me bring her up river last night, and he slept on board.  He aint goin’ with us, but he’ll help us with this stuff.”

Then he shouted:  “Hey!  Clarence!”

The “Hoppergrass” was Captain Bannister’s boat,—­he had just bought her.  He did not like the name, but as yet he had not found any way of changing it.  Captain Bannister was a retired seaman, but I do not know whether he had ever been a full-fledged captain of a ship.  In our town it was often the custom to call a man “Captain” if he had ever risen as high as mate.  The Captain was a short, red-faced man, with such bowed legs that you could have pushed a barrel, end-ways, right between them.  Ed Mason thought that the Captain’s legs were bowed like that because he had been made to sit for hours astride a barrel.  Ed believed that this was a favorite form of punishment on board ship,—­especially in the navy.

I had a different idea about the Captain’s legs.  It was my belief that they were what sailors call “sea-legs.”  I had often read, in stories about the ocean, of people who were very sick and unhappy until the got their “sea-legs.”  After that, as near as I could make out, they could balance themselves better as they walked the deck, and they didn’t mind the rolling of the ship.  It seemed resonable that a man who had followed the sea for forty years, like the Captain, would get “sea-legs” for good and all.  But we never dared to ask the Captain about it.

“Hey!  Clarence!” he shouted again.  “What’s the matter with yer?  Think we want to stand here all day?”