"Nobody'd believe us.

A stout little craft like that sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale! No, sir.

I never believed that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he claimed he was a survivor of the sinkin' of the _Essex_, an' no more will anybody believe me." "The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft," mourned the Ancient Mariner.

"Never were there more dainty and lovable topmasts on a three- masted schooner, and never was there a three-masted schooner that worked like the witch she was to windward." Dag Daughtry, who had kept always footloose and never married, surveyed the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was anchored--Kwaque, the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved from the bellies of his fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook whose age was problematical only by decades; the Ancient Mariner, the dignified, the beloved, and the respected; gangly Big John, the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of a giant and the mind of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps, the outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-feathered mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly seductive as a charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the lithe and tawny slayer of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah Moy.

And the Marquesas were two hundred miles distant full-hauled on the tradewind which had ceased but which was as sure to live again as the morning sun in the sky.
The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the memory- picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe.