ne
side of the slip; the _Sea Mist_, a clumsy craft that couldn't stir short
of a half gale, spent the winter on the other side. Over them, on racks,
the rowboats were slung. There was a larger boathouse for the big fellows.
What busy days we spent in May or June, caulking and scraping and painting,
splicing and repairing, making the little _Idler_ ready for the sea again!
She was an eighteen-foot cat, a bit of a tub, I fear, but the best on the
Pond in her day, eating up close into the wind, sensitive, alert, with a
pair of white heels she had shown to many a larger craft. Surely it was but
yesterday that I rowed out to her where she was moored a hundred feet from
shore, climbed aboard, hoisted sail, and, with my pipe drawing sweetly, sat
down beside the tiller and played out the sheet till the sail filled; there
was a crack and snaffle of straining tackle, the boat leaped forward, the
tiller batted my ribs, the _Idler_ heeled over, and then quietly, softly,
as rhythmic as a song, the water raced hissing along her rail, the little
waves slapped beneath her bow--and the world was good to be alive in!
Surely it was but yesterday that the white sail of the _Idler_ was like a
gull's wing on the Pond!

But the white sail wings are few on the Pond to-day, and the _Idler_ lies
on her side in the weeds behind the boathouse. She had to make room for the
motor craft. She is too bulky for a flower bed, too convex for a bench. Her
paint is nearly gone now, both the yellow body colour and the pretty green
and white stripe along her rail that we used to put on with such care. Her
seams are yawning, and the rain water pool that at first settled on the low
side of her cockpit has now seeped through, and a little deposit of soil
has accumulated, in which a sickly weed is growing. Poor old _Idler_! One
day I got an axe, resolved to break her up, but when it came to the point
of burying the first blow my resolution failed. I thought of all the hours
of enthusiastic labour I had spent upon those eighteen feet of oak ribs and
planking; I thought of all the thrilling hours of the race, when we had
squeezed her into the wind past Perry's Point and saved a precious tack; I
thought of the dreamy hours when she had borne us down the Pond in the
summer sunshine, or through the gray, mysterious fog, or under the stars
above the black water. So instead, I laid my hand gently on her rotting
tiller, and then took the axe back to the woodshed. She will