He adjusted the oar and I seated myself at it and began to row. He sat in the bows of the boat near the tall mast and I upon a hinder seat near to that end of the boat which I had heard him call the ‘stern sheets.’ I did not find the oar so heavy as I had imagined. The boatman had placed it so as to fairly balance it and I continued to swing it without much trouble. But after I had been rowing a few minutes the pressure of the handle of the oar in my grasp caused my rings to hurt me. I endured the inconvenience until it became a pain; then, tilting the oar and supporting it by my elbow, I pulled off my rings--that is to say, my wedding-ring and two others, all that I wore--and placed them by my side on the sail, which lay in a sort of bundle along the seats. I never had any superstitious feeling about my wedding-ring. Over and over again had I removed it to wash my hands. With many women, when once the wedding-ring is on, it is on for ever. Well would it have been for me had I possessed the sentiment of tender and graceful superstition that influences most wives in this way. My rings being removed I applied myself again to the oar, and for about a quarter of an hour Bill Hitchens and I continued to row the boat out into the open sea. By this time we had reached a distance of a mile from the land. The faint air had been slowly freshening into a little breeze, and the water was rippling briskly against the side of the boat. I was now tired of rowing, and, asking Bill Hitchens to take the oar from me, I rose from my seat and sat down near the tiller. ‘May as well hoist the sail now, lady, don’t ye think?’ said Bill Hitchens. ‘Yes, you can hoist the sail,’ said I, ‘but I do not wish to go too far from the land. What o’clock is it?’ He extracted an old silver watch from somewhere under his jersey and gave me the time. ‘I wish to be home by about a quarter past four,’ said I. He answered that he would see to it, and, seizing hold of a rope which passed through the top of the mast, he hoisted the sail. He then came to where I was sitting, and set the little sail upon the mast at the stern, and when this was done he grasped the tiller, and the boat, feeling the pressure of the breeze in her broad canvas--for though she was a small boat she carried a sail that I would think was disproportionately large for her size--heeled over and cut through the water on her side very quickly. ‘It’s a nice soldier’s wind for the land, lady,’ said the boatman. ‘What is a soldier’s wind?’ I asked. ‘Why,’ he answered, ‘a wind that allows ye to go there and back wherever ye may be bound to.’ ‘The coast looks a long way off, Hitchens.’ ‘It’s vurking up a bit hazy, lady, but there’s nothen to hurt.’