captain called "the hellum", against the tiller of which he occasionally
allowed his apprentice to lean his back while he attended to other work.
Wilkinson was proud. This was genuine navigation, this steering a large
vessel with your back; any mere landsman, he now saw, could coil up
ropes like Coristine. The subject of this reflection was quite happy in
the bow, chumming with The Crew. Smoking their pipes together, Sylvanus
confided to his apprentice that a sailor's life was the lonesomest life
out of jail, when the cap'n was that quiet and stand off like as one he
knowed that wasn't far away, nuther. Coristine sympathized with him.
"The bossest time that ever was on this yere old _Susan Thomas_," he
continued, "was last summer wonst when the cap'n's niece, she come along
fer a trip. There was another gal along with her, a regular stunner, she
was. Wot her name was I raley can't tell, 'cos that old owl of a cap'n,
whenever he'd speak to her, allers said Miss Do Please. I reckon that's
what she used to say to him, coaxin' like, and he kep' it up on her.
Well, we was becalmed three days right out on the lake, and I had to row
the blessed dingy in the bilin' sun over to Snake Island to get bread
and meat from the Snakes."

"From the snakes!" ejaculated Coristine, "why this beats Elijah's ravens
all to nothing."

"Oh, the Snakes is Injuns, and Miss Carmichael, that's the cap'n's gal,
says their rale name is Kinapick."

"Look here, Sylvanus, what did you say the captain's name is?"

"Oh, the old pill's name is Thomas, like the schooner, but, you see, he
married one of the pretty Carruthers gals, and a good match it was; for,
I tell ye, them Carruthers gals hold their heads mighty high. Why, the