I forgot entirely my grievance against the second mate, and could only look at it longingly, as a dog eyes a bone, licking my chops. Peter laughed to see me. “Do you know what it is to be, then?” {120} “Anybody would know that. It will be beautiful, Peter. Do—do you suppose I ’ll ever be able to do anything like that?” “You ’re able to do something like that now. It ’s nothing now, but you wait till I have it farther along. I have to shape it a bit more to make it a true copy—and it ’s going to be a true copy, Timmie—and then I ’ll cut the deck down to show the rail. Every plank, chain plate, and bolt that shows on the outside of the ship is going to show on this model. Then I have to build the deckhouses out of plates of ivory scraped thin, and build the try-works, and step ivory masts, and rig her with ivory spars and ivory sails scraped thin as paper. And there ’s to be ivory blocks, and the rigging ’s to be silk thread. It ’ll be quite proper, and scraped and polished till it shines. I have it in my mind, and it grows as I get on. Aye, it ’ll be quite proper.” It was quite proper. As I raise my eyes to the mantel, there sits the dainty model now. Much of the rigging of silk thread is rotten and brittle, and breaks at a touch; but the rest of Peter’s handiwork is of more enduring stuff, although yellow with age. It makes me positively homesick to see the very decks that I trod, the wheel under its roof and the rail at the stern upon which I had leaned so many times, looking over the sluggish wake, the gangway with the cutting-stage in place, the great blocks of the cutting-tackles, the try-works with the bench against its after side; every detail of the ship and its fittings reproduced, even to the boats lashed to their stiff davits, the cranes swung out for them to rest upon, and little harpoons and lances and spades in place. The paper-thin, translucent ivory sails still hang from their ivory yards and belly with the breeze. It makes me homesick, I say, and makes that time—it was a happy time, on the whole—it makes that time even more real than does my journal, which lies before me. At the time when I first {121} saw that model, however, rough as it then was, I could only gape and smile, and I said nothing coherent, I think.