"My opinion is that he was unexpectedly held up at Shanghai. It's a new port for us, and, Captain Verney tells me, very difficult to make: after Woosung you have to get hold of two bamboo poles stuck up on the bank a hundred feet apart as a leading mark, and, with these in range, steer for the bar. The channel is very narrow, and he says the _Nautilus_ would have to wait for high water, perhaps for the spring tide. She may have got ashore, strained and sprung a leak, and had to discharge her cargo for repairs." "That's never Gerrit," the elder replied positively. "There isn't a better master afloat. He can smell shoal water. I was certain we'd hear from him when the _Sorsogon_ was back from Calcutta. Do you suppose, William, that he took the _Nautilus_ about the Horn and--?" Laurel wondered at the unmannerly way in which he gulped his coffee. "He might have driven into the Antarctic winter," he proceeded. "My deck was swept and all the boats stove off the Falklands in April." "Gerrit's got a ship," the other asserted, "not a hermaphrodite brig built like a butter box. You'll find that I am right and that he has been tied up in port." "I made eight hundred per cent on a first cargo for my owners," the elder retorted. "Then there was trading, yes, and sailing, too. No chronometers with confounded rates of variation and other fancy parlor instruments to read your position from. When I first navigated it was with an astrolabe and the moon. A master knew his lead, latitude and lookout then. "Eight hundred barrels of flour and pine boards to Rio and back with coffee and hides for Salem," he continued; "then out to Gibraltar and Brazil with wine and on in ballast for Calcutta. Tahiti and Morea, the Sandwich Islands and the Feejees. Sandalwood and tortoise shell and beche de mer; sea horses' teeth, and saltpeter for the Chinese Government. I don't want to hear about your bills of exchange and kegs of Spanish dollars and solid cargoes of tea run back direct. Why, with your Canton and India agents and sight drafts the China service is like dealing with a Boston store." Laurel saw that her father was assuming the expression of restrained annoyance habitual when the elder contrasted old shipping ways with new. "Unfortunately," he said, "the patient Chinaman will no longer exchange silks and lacquer and teas for boiled sea slugs. He has learned to demand something of value." "Why, damn it, William," the other exploded, "nothing's more valuable to a Chinese than his belly. They'll give eighteen hundred dollars a pecul for birds' nests any day. As for your insinuation that we used to diddle them--I never ran opium up from India to rot their souls. And when the Chinese Government tried to stop it there's the British commercial interests forcing it on them with cannon in 'forty-two.