"Where are ye off to, Starrie?" inquired Godey Peck, a youth of this type, one fair November afternoon, intercepting Leon about an hour after school had closed. "Don't you want to come along with me? I'm going down to Stanway's shipyard to have a look at the new vessel that they're going to launch at daybreak to-morrow. She's all wedged up on the ways, ready to go. Say!" Godey edged slyly nearer to Leon, "us boys--Choc Latour, Benjie Lane an' me--have hit on a plan for being launched in her. You know they won't allow boys to be aboard, if they know it, when she shoots off the launching ways. But those ship carpenters'll have to rise bright and early if they want to get ahead of us! See?" Godey laid a forefinger against the left side of his nose, to emphasize a high opinion of his own subtlety. "How are you going to work it?" Leon asked briefly. "Why! there's a vessel 'most built on the stocks right 'longside the finished hull. Us boys are going to wake very early, trot down to the shipyard before any of the workmen are around; then we'll shin up the staging an' over the half-built vessel right onto the white deck o' the new one that's waiting to be launched. 'Twill be easy to drop below into the cabin an' hide under the bunks until the time comes for launching her. When we hear 'em knocking out the last block from under her keel--when she's just beginning to crawl--then we'll pop up an' be on deck when she's launched; see?" "Ho! So you're going to do the stowaway act, eh?" Starrie Chase, with that characteristic snap of his brown eyes, seemed to be taking a mental photograph of the plan. "Only for an hour or two. You want to be in this too; don't you, Starrie?" Leon was silent, considering. The underhand scheme ran counter to the aboveboard principles of the scout law which he had sworn to obey; of that he felt sure. "On my honor I will do my best ... to keep myself morally straight!" Voluntarily and enthusiastically he had taken the chivalrous oath, and he was "too much of a fellow" to go back on it deliberately. "No! I don't want to play stowaway," he answered after a minute. "It's a crazy plan anyhow! Give it up, Gode! Likely enough you'll scratch up the paint of the new cabin with your boots, skulking there all three of you--then there'll be a big row; and 'twould seem a pity, too, after all the months it has taken to build an' paint that dandy new hull." Such a view would scarcely have presented itself to Leon two months ago; he certainly was "deepening the water" in which he floated. "Well, let's pop down to the shipyard anyhow, an' see her!" urged Godey, hoping that a contemplation of the new vessel, airily wedged high on the launching ways, with her bridal deck white as a hound's tooth, would weaken the other's resolution. "No, I'll be down there to-morrow morning, on the river-slip, to see her go. But I want to do something else this afternoon. I'm going home to study." "What?"