miable person (He esteemed it his
business to keep the boys in order); and the first time Harvey, in fear
and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin up to the main-truck
(Dan was behind him ready to help), he esteemed it his duty to hang
Salters's big sea-boots up there--a sight of shame and derision to the
nearest schooner. With Disko, Harvey took no liberties; not even when
the old man dropped direct orders, and treated him, like the rest of
the crew, to "Don't you want to do so and so?" and "Guess you'd
better," and so forth. There was something about the clean-shaven lips
and the puckered corners of the eyes that was mightily sobering to
young blood.

Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which,
he said, laid over any government publication whatsoever; led him,
pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks--Le
Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and Grand--talking "cod"
meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on which the "hog-yoke" was
worked.

In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures,
and the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen
Bank sun appealed to all his keen wits. For other sea-matters his age
handicapped him. As Disko said, he should have begun when he was ten.
Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at
a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-score on his palm, could dress
down by sense of touch. He could steer in anything short of half a gale
from the feel of the wind on his face, humouring the _We're Here_ just
when she needed it. These things he did as automatically as he skipped
about the rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body.
But he could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey.

Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the
schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc'sle or sat on the
cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and
rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in
the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death
agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in
the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off
wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and
boiling-down, and that terrible "nip" of '71, when twelve hundred men
were made homeless on the ice in three days--wond