The following morning Tommy came ashore bright and early, and, with Cousin Kate to play guide, the three Folgers spent the time up to the midday dinner hour in seeing as much of Boston as the limits of time and space permitted. In the afternoon Tommy personally conducted them all aboard the _Spray_, where Captain Bartlet was waiting, bluff and genial and anxious to please, to show them alow and aloft over his slim and graceful clipper now lying at anchor on the gently ruffled waters of the harbor. She had finished taking her cargo on board, and had moved out to a roomier anchorage offshore where she could the more easily spread her white gulls’ wings with the next morning’s early tide, and slip away on the first tack of her voyage to the East. Captain Bartlet had sent one of her boats in to the wharf to transfer his expected visitors to the ship, and they spent—for Erica, at all events—an enchanted three hours thereafter, exploring the marvelous intricacies and surprises which a ship of that size, and especially a sailing-ship, invariably possesses for the inexperienced landsman. The last tearful good-bys to Tommy, which must be said on board, rather obscured the earlier happiness of the afternoon, though the boy kept saying, rather jerkily and with an over-emphatic cheerfulness: “It’s only for six months or so, mother. Why, Rick, you know you’d give your eyes to be going, too!” He did not materially deceive any of his feminine relatives, and was finally forced to desist, by a most unmanly and uncomfortable lump in his own throat. But they got through the bad moment without actually breaking down, and were rowed back to the wharf, waving a whole sheaf of handkerchiefs with pretended gayety to a madly-waving, long-legged Tommy perched precariously on the _Spray’s_ port rail. However, as things turned out, they might have postponed the farewells until later, for, just as they were sitting down—rather silent, and inclined to avoid each other’s eyes—at Cousin Kate’s lavishly spread supper table that evening, the heavy knocker on the front door clanged and Tommy himself appeared in the dining-room door, in Cousin Kate’s wake. He announced that the captain had sent him ashore with a message to be delivered, and had added permission for a final visit to his family. The _Spray_ carried a few cabin passengers, all of whom, but one, had come aboard with their possessions that afternoon. One, however, a widow traveling out to Canton to join a merchant brother engaged in the tea trade, had been detained by some unexpected emergency and could not go out to the ship until morning. Captain Bartlet had, therefore, sent Tommy ashore to tell her that the _Spray_ would sail by seven o’clock and that a boat would be waiting at the wharf for her promptly at six.