after.

"That's no way o' gettin' into a boat," said Dan. "Ef there was any sea
you'd go to the bottom, sure. You got to learn to meet her."

Dan fitted the thole-pins, took the forward thwart and watched Harvey's
work. The boy had rowed, in a lady-like fashion, on the Adirondack
ponds; but there is a difference between squeaking pins and
well-balanced ruflocks--light sculls and stubby, eight-foot sea-oars.
They stuck in the gentle swell, and Harvey grunted.

"Short! Row short!" said Dan. "Ef you cramp your oar in any kind o' sea
you're liable to turn her over. Ain't she a daisy? Mine, too."

The little dory was specklessly clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor,
two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding.
A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey's right hand,
beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick.
A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all
neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale.

"Where's the sail and mast?" said Harvey, for his hands were beginning
to blister.

Dan chuckled. "Ye don't sail fishin'-dories much. Ye pull; but ye
needn't pull so hard. Don't you wish you owned her?"

"Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked 'em,"
Harvey replied. He had been too busy to think much of his family till
then.

"That's so. I forgot your dad's a millionaire. You don't act millionary
any, naow. But a dory an' craft an' gear"--Dan spoke as though she were
a whaleboat--"costs a heap. Think your dad 'u'd give you one fer--fer a
pet like?"

"Shouldn't wonder. It would be 'most the only thing I haven't stuck him
for yet."

"Must be an expensive kinder kid to home. Don't slitheroo thet way,
Harve. Short's the trick, because no sea's ever dead still, an' the
swells 'll--"

Crack! The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him
backwards.

"That was what I was goin' to say. I hed to learn too, but I wasn't
more than eight years old when I got my schoolin'."

Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown.

"No good gettin' mad at things, Dad says. It's our own fault ef we
can't handle 'em, he says. Le's try here. Manuel 'll give us the water."

The "Portugee" was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an
oar he waved his left arm three times.

"Thirty fathom," said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook. "Over
with the doughboys. Bait s