‘Do you think so?’ I said, smiling. ‘Well, I’ll heighten your barricade for you, and still you shall help me to scale it. I’m a boy stowaway; I must carry nothing to sea but the clothes I stand in. But you’ll ship a large crew, and you’ll have a big slop-chest, so there’ll be the materials for a rig-out when I want one. I emerge when the proper time comes and am walked aft to the captain. Now, what will he do with me? He may put me on the articles as an ordinary seaman. That must certainly end in my helping the cook or doing cabin-work. But then, there’s my sex to fall back upon in case of impracticable duties. I declare myself a woman--let them invent a motive for my being on board; they’ll find me dumb in that. Some of the guard are sure to be married, the wives will be on board, and there’ll be female quarters for me if I own my sex. But it will be a strong forcing of my hand to bring me to it. Once a boy, Will, I’m a boy till I step ashore.’ He stared at me with admiration and excitement, as though he listened to some wild, romantic story of adventure. ‘All that is material lies shaped in my mind,’ I went on. ‘Of course, a great deal must be left to chance.’ ‘What will father and mother think?’ ‘They mustn’t know. Why need they know, Will? Put it thus: In any case I go where Tom is sent. That being certain, what can it signify to aunt and uncle how I go? Instead of following in a passenger ship, I choose to make sure of my object in leaving home by putting myself into the same vessel with Tom. Your telling your father would only lead to this: He and your mother will tease me to death with representations of my folly without causing me to swerve a hair’s-breadth in my resolution. And they might do me this mischief: with the best intentions in the world, they might inform your captain that I mean to dress up as a boy and hide myself in his fore-peak. No, not a word to father or mother, Will. This is quite my business and our secret.’ All the while I was talking I was pacing the room, occasionally stopping to gesticulate or to approach him close and grasp him by the arm. Now he got up and began to walk about, too, rolling to and fro as though the floor had been a ship’s quarter-deck, whilst he swore that I had too much spirit for a woman, that my scheme was too daring, that if I knew what a fore-peak was like in a heavy head sea, with the prospect of a fortnight of blackness along with the risk of dying of hunger and thirst, without possibility of escape unless I was liberated, I’d quit the scheme as hopeless.