She grew up quickly on the ways, that ship of their very hearts’ desire, with her bowsprit standing far out over the neighboring street, and with people stopping in the lane to watch Jonathan’s whole force of workmen toiling up and down her timbered sides. Old Navy officers who had seen, some of them, the ships of the Revolution, and who had all fought in the War of Eighteen-twelve, would come to inspect her and would shake their heads. “Look at that high, sharp bow,” one would say; “such a craft will never be seaworthy in the world. Why can’t these young fellows stick to the models we have tried out for them?” “And see the spread of sail this drawing shows,” another would comment, pointing fiercely with a stubby forefinger; “why, the whole ridiculous affair will capsize in the first good puff of wind! I’m thankful I don’t have to go to sea in her.” But the two comrades closed their ears and sat, often far into the night, in the cramped little office, poring over drawings and comparing designs. “You have her thought out to the last ring, block and halyard,” Humphrey would say, “and you never even knew if you could build her. What a dreamer you are!” “It takes dreaming to keep a man at his work,” Jonathan would answer. “How do you think I would have had the patience, all these years, to drive wooden pins into cross-timbers, or to mend the rigging of limping coastwise schooners if I had not been thinking of just such a ship as this, and seen her, in my mind’s eye, putting to sea under full sail, to smash every sailing record that has been known?” The day of the launching came, then the stepping of the giant masts, the completing of the rigging and the bending of the new sails. “The _West Wind_ will be ready for sea in two weeks now,” Humphrey said, one morning at breakfast to Miranda Reynolds—she was my great-grandmother and I was named for her. They had been married only a month and this would be his first cruise since their wedding. She drew her breath quickly, she had not known it was to be so soon. “People say,” she began hesitatingly, “old sailors and longshoremen and even the Naval officers that have been here, say that the _West Wind_ will never stand a storm.” “They are the kind of men,” Humphrey scoffed, “who would be sailing vessels of the model of the Ark, did not people like Jonathan Adams have the courage, sometimes, to build something new. No, the _West Wind_ is going to teach all the shipmasters something they never knew before, when once she sets sail. And we expect to clear for Gibraltar in less than a month. Why, Miranda, you’re not crying?” “No,” declared Miranda, choking bravely, for tears have no place in a sea captain’s household. She even managed to muster a watery smile. “I wonder what you will leave behind you in foreign parts this time, your gold snuffbox, perhaps.”