ything happens. Penn, you go below right
off an' git your coffee. You ought to hev more sense than to bum
araound on deck this weather."

"Now they'll swill coffee an' play checkers till the cows come home,"
said Dan, as Uncle Salters hustled Penn into the fore-cabin. "'Looks to
me like's if we'd all be doin' so fer a spell. There's nothin' in
creation deader-limpsey-idler'n a Banker when she ain't on fish."

"I'm glad ye spoke, Danny," cried Long Jack, who had been casting round
in search of amusement. "I'd clean forgot we'd a passenger under that
T-wharf hat. There's no idleness for thim that don't know their ropes.
Pass him along, Tom Platt, an' we'll larn him."

"'Tain't my trick this time," grinned Dan. "You've got to go it alone.
Dad learned me with a rope's end."

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'-