The ship did not respond to our signal, however. She was nearly a mile away, going like a race-horse, with everything she owned on her yards, and the wind just abaft the beam. She may not have seen our signal—she may not have looked for it, her master being unwilling to go to the very considerable trouble involved in taking a packet of letters from an old whaler. At any rate, she did not stop or give any sign. She was a beautiful sight as she passed to windward under her cloud of canvas, making a good sixteen knots, bowing slowly and gracefully, and shouldering the seas out of her way, smothered in foam to her knightheads. There is nothing so beautiful as a full-rigged clipper ship with all her towering spread of sail, and with as much wind as she can stagger under. I watched her as long as I could see her, thinking that merely sailing in such a ship must be sheer pleasure such as we in the Clearchus could not realize. I found that I was smiling to myself. I wish that the day of the sailing ship might come again. It really seems as if it might. There is a wide field for the large, fast sailing ship. There is none for the small, slow ship. After all, it is a {143} question of costs: crews and wages against investment and depreciation and the price of coal or oil. We kept on down the coast of South America, but well out of sight of land, for ten days. For the first half of the time we had the southeast trades, which were very nearly east, and nothing happened to break the pleasant monotony. I read the “Lives of the Navigators,” for before long we should be off the coast of Patagonia, and I wished to prepare for that experience. No information was to be despised, and who knows how much the true Patagonians have changed in three hundred years? I kept track of Peter’s scrimshawing too, although I did none myself, and I devoted a good deal of time to my studies. Mr. Brown spent a good deal of time in helping me, and from casual remarks and allusions that he made from time to time I had pieced out a fragmentary history of his career. I had a pretty good notion that Brown was not his real name, but I had no evidence of it. His story, as far as I had been able to get at it, with some guesses on my part, was this. He had come of good family, with some money; how much I could not tell, but enough to send him to a good school and to college. At school he was rather wild and uncontrollable, and at college he was worse. In the middle of his college course came the Civil War, and he left college and enlisted. What his history had been in the war I could not guess, for he made but one allusion to being in it at all. When the war was over, he went back to college; but in his senior year he got into some drunken scrape, and was expelled. His father seemed to have been a hard kind of man, or perhaps he had got discouraged and tired of pulling him out of scrapes, and he turned him adrift.