The only subjects that really interested the latter at this period dealt with nautical matters, and when Erica realized this she ransacked the libraries of all Miss Charity’s friends, to find old ships’ logs and journals of exploration which she could borrow. As Nantucketers have always been great travelers, almost every house in town proved to have some tale or other to offer, often containing the adventures of a seafaring ancestor, and the quaint language they were told in sent the young Folgers into peals of hilarious laughter. Lis joined these reading sessions whenever he could, but his mother and aunt kept him busy undergoing tedious fittings, aiding them in checking and rechecking lists of his various needs for the voyage, and performing the usual household duties such as wood-chopping, fire-making, and the carrying of heavy pails, which formerly Tommy and he had divided between them. Mrs. Folger had arranged with young Martin Joy, two doors away, to do these chores until Tommy’s broken bones had mended, but he was not to enter on his duties until Lis had departed. Instinctively, Erica tried to keep herself so busy that she should have no time left for remembering the change that was to break up the familiar threefold companionship shortly. But hard as it was on her, she guessed that it was going to be harder still for Tommy. The twins had never been separated for more than a few hours at a time, and Lis had always been the steady, self-reliant one on whom both Tommy and Erica herself unconsciously leaned. The latter two were more alike, bubbling over with high spirits, impetuous, apt to act on the moment’s enthusiasm, and they had come to feel it was Lister’s natural province to extricate them from the scrapes their own heedlessness led them into, and to provide a sort of moral balance wheel generally. It was going to be queer, Erica reflected, sadly, going on with the old, everyday life, in the old, everyday surroundings, with no Lis. In fact, it was going to be worse than queer—it was going to be a pretty heart-breaking business. The night before Lister’s sailing, Tommy took the jade seal ring from where it still hung about his own neck on the knotted Chinese cord and put it around his brother’s. “Be sure you look old Sun Li up for Rick and me,” he said. “Then remember every last thing about him—who he is, where he lives (better see the inside of his house if you can, so you’ll be able to describe it), and tell us all about it when the _Spray_ comes home.” Erica and both her aunts went down to the wharf the next afternoon, and saw Lis aboard Captain Joy’s sloop, which was to take him to Boston. They all kissed him good-by, and Aunt Callie cried a little because, just at the end, she simply couldn’t help it, and Lis’s own voice was more than a bit husky in the final exchange of last words, and promises to write if there should be a chance to send a letter back by another ship.