Upon his return from his first voyage as third mate Matt went up for his second mate’s certificate and passed very handily.  Naturally he expected prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of experience in a second mate—­also the value of years and physical weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell his ego.  Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as third mate before the Old Man promoted him.

For a year, Matt Peasley did nicely; then, in a gale off the Orinoco River, with the captain too ill to appear on deck, the first mate went by the board, leaving the command of the ship to young Matt.  She was dismasted at the time, but the lad brought her into Rio on the stumps, thus attracting some little attention to himself from his owners, who paid his passage back to Portland by steamer and found a second mate’s berth for him in one of their clipper ships bound round the Horn.

Of course Matt was too young to know they had their eyes on him for future skipper material and were sending him around Cape Horn for the invaluable experience he would encounter on such a voyage.  All he realized was that he was going round the Horn, as became one of the House of Peasley, no member of which would ever regard him as a real sailor until he could point to a Cape Horn diploma as evidence that he had graduated from the school for amateurs.

Matt Peasley lacked two months of his twentieth birthday when he stepped onto a San Francisco dock, in his pocket a highly complimentary discharge as second mate from the master of the clipper ship—­for Matt had elected to quit.  In fact, he had to, for on the way round the mate had picked on him and called him Sonny and Mother’s Darling Boy; and Matt, having, in the terminology of the forecastle, come aboard through the hawse pipes, knew himself for a man and a sailor, despite the paucity of whiskers on his big, square boyish chin.

Accordingly he had advised the mate to address him only in the line of duty, on which occasions he desired to be referred to as Mr. Peasley, and, the mate demurring from this program, the customary maritime fracas had ensued.  Consequently, somebody had to quit on arrival at San Francisco; and since, Matt was the last to come, he was the first to go.  On the strength of his two previous discharges he shipped as second mate on the bark Andrew Welch, for a voyage to Honolulu and back; then, his services as second mate being all in, he went before the inspectors for his first mate’s ticket and was awarded an unlimited license.

Matt was now past twenty; and, though not fully filled out, he was big enough to be a chief kicker anywhere.  Six feet three in his bare feet; two hundred pounds in the buff; lean, lithe and supple as a panther, the mere sight of his big lumpy shoulders would have been sufficient to have quelled an incipient mutiny.  Nevertheless, graduate that he was of a hard, hard school, his face was that of an innocent, trusting, good-natured, immature boy, proclaiming him exactly what he knew his men called him—­a big, over-grown kid.  He hated himself for his glorious youth.