recommend from that quarter. Airheart's skipper of
the San Jose now. What I was getting at is to know whether you'd lend
me Dan for a year or two, and we'll see if we can't make a mate of him.
Would you trust him to Airheart?"

"It's a resk taking a raw boy--"

"I know a man who did more for me."

"That's diff'runt. Look at here naow, I ain't recommendin' Dan special
because he's my own flesh an' blood. I know Bank ways ain't clipper
ways, but he hain't much to learn. Steer he can--no boy better, if I
say it--an' the rest's in our blood an' get; but I could wish he warn't
so cussed weak on navigation."

"Airheart will attend to that. He'll ship as boy for a voyage or two,
and then we can put him in the way of doing better. Suppose you take
him in hand this winter, and I'll send for him early in the spring. I
know the Pacific's a long ways off--"

"Pshaw! We Troops, livin' an' dead, are all around the earth an' the
seas thereof."

"But I want you to understand--and I mean this--any time you think
you'd like to see him, tell me, and I'll attend to the transportation.
'Twon't cost you a cent."

"If you'll walk a piece with me, we'll go to my house an' talk this to
my woman. I've bin so crazy mistook in all my jedgments, it don't seem
to me this was like to be real."

They went blue-trimmed of nasturtiums over to Troop's
eighteen-hundred-dollar, white house, with a retired dory full in the
front yard and a shuttered parlour which was a museum of oversea
plunder. There sat a large woman, silent and grave, with the dim eyes
of those who look long to sea for the return of their beloved. Cheyne
addressed himself to her, and she gave consent wearily.

"We lose one hundred a year from Gloucester only, Mr. Cheyne," she
said--"one hundred boys an' men; and I've come so's to hate the sea as
if 'twuz alive an' listenin'. God never made it fer humans to anchor
on. These packets o' yours they go straight out, I take it' and
straight home again?"

"As straight as the winds let 'em, and I give a bonus for record
passages. Tea don't improve by being at sea."

"When he wuz little he used to play at keeping store, an' I had hopes
he might follow that up. But soon's he could paddle a dory I knew that
were goin' to be denied me."

"They're square-riggers, Mother; iron-built an' well found. Remember
what Phil's sister reads you when she gits his letters."

"I've never known as Phil told lies, but he's too venturesome (like
mo