"It's Jimmy! Take him away! Take him away!" shouted several, Martin and Scouse among them. We were all tumbling out of our bunks. Frenchy shot through the open door of the fo'c'sle and Scouse close after him. Suddenly there was a wild mixture of screams and screeches and Australia exploded in a loud, whole-souled oath of relief. He held the struggling Jake by the tail feathers. The parrot had recently been about the only consistent listener to the doctrines of Charlie Horse, and his appearance in our fo'c'sle at night gave him a chance to retail some of his new line of talk. Someone had evidently left his cage open and he came in to get out of the draft. From this time on the bird got to be a nuisance as well as a reminder of our folly. Frenchy sold him to Chips for a suit of oilskins. During these days of the voyage we overhauled our best suit of sails preparatory to bending them for the heavy weather off the Cape. I had by that time become fairly proficient in the use of the palm and needle and could sew a presentable flat seam, or round seam, as occasion demanded. Frenchy was the best sailmaker in our watch, and with Brenden and myself, constituted the sailmaker's gang to port. Old Smith, Hitchen and Axel were the starboard complement in this kind of work. We had our benches in the most comfortable part of the deck and of a morning, after the washdown, while we were getting the canvas out, the rest of the crowd would wipe the deck dry with pieces of old sugar bags, getting right down on their shin bones and rubbing the planks. We put in new tabling, renewed lining cloths, sewed on new leather at the clews, wetting it so that when dry the leather would shrink tight, gripping the bolt ropes so the strands would show through. In some of the older sails we sewed an extra line of stitching down the middle of the double flat seam where the cloths join. I learned to properly work the reef and head holes. The canvas was cut with a "stabber" and a small fish line grommet laid over the edge, the hole then being finished off with a fencing of heavy waxed and double laid twine. In these later degenerate days, a brass eyelet ring is often crimped around the hole, a much quicker job and about one-third as strong. In all of the lore of cutting canvas for sails, and we made a set of skysails on the voyage, the mate was a past master. The "roaching," the proper way to allow for gores in the cloths, the fact that "square" sails are anything but square; all such old-time knowledge was handed down and eagerly assimilated. We talked of the "hoist" of this sail, meaning sails that spread by hoisting the yard; and the "drop" of that sail, referring to the courses and lower tops'ls.