It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the poop-rail gazing for’ard, when Miss West joined me. She had been busy below all day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of air. She surveyed the sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five minutes, then remarked: “The barometer’s very high—30.60. This light north wind won’t last. It will either go into a calm or work around into a north-east gale.” “Which would you prefer?” I asked. “The gale, by all means. It will help us off the land, and it will put me through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly. Oh, yes,” she added, “I’m a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the beginning of every voyage. You probably won’t see me for a couple of days now. That’s why I’ve been so busy getting settled first.” “Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at sea,” I said. “And I’ve seen father sea-sick on occasion,” she answered. “Yes, and some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known.” Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting pacing up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail. Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck below us. To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing than ever. “A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike,” Miss West remarked. “The worst ever,” he growled, “and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones. We’re teachin’ them the ropes just now—most of ’em.” “They look starved,” I commented. “They are, they almost always are,” Miss West answered, and her eyes roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer’s fashion I had marked in Mr. Pike. “But they’ll fatten up with regular hours, no whiskey, and solid food—won’t they, Mr. Pike?” “Oh, sure. They always do. And you’ll see them liven up when we get ’em in hand . . . maybe. They’re a measly lot, though.” I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas. Our four masts seemed to have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us, under Mr. Mellaire’s direction, were setting triangular sails, like jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped one another. The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled these small sails led me to ask: “But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?” He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head from both sides of a street. “Do?” Miss West answered for him. “We’d get the sail off. Oh, it can be done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it couldn’t, I should have been drowned long ago.” “Sure,” Mr. Pike upheld her. “So would I.” “The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in a pinch,” Miss West went on.