. "Don't let her get any nearer, leastwise while he's aloft
with the glasses."

It looked as if we would have to wait to get to Boston to settle the
question. Meantime, if Drislane would only try to forget everything of
shore matters, he might be getting great comfort of a run like this. If
he were himself, he would by now, being half in the way of a poet and
half hoping some day to be an artist, be drawing little water-colors and
writing little rhymes of these two big schooners racing home together.

'Twould have been well worth his paint and paper. The _Orion_ and the
_Sirius_ were two of the best in their class and more trimly modelled
than most. What the _Orion_ looked like we must have looked like, and
she was something I used to spend whole watches on deck just looking at.
She carried an open rail amidships, and her white-painted stanchions,
carved to hour-glass form, with the white-painted flat hand-rail atop,
stood clearly, sharply, beautifully out above her black lower sides and
the pale-green seas.

Not that either of us had much lower planking to show, for four thousand
five hundred tons of coal had brought us pretty well down to our
scuppers. Too deep-loaded for our best looks, some would say; but I
don't know--with all her jibs and all whole sail to her five lower
spars, we must have looked pretty good, the pair of us, plugging along
together through the curling rollers. We had set no topsails or
staysails, because they would not have stayed on, blowing as it was a
good half-gale.

[Illustration: The _Orion_ proved to us that she was faster off the wind
than we were by rounding Cape Cod before us.]

It could have been blowing twice a gale and nothing happened to either
of us. Probably no stiffer class of vessels sails the seas than the big
coasters of our side of the North Atlantic. Give them plenty of ballast
and there is no capsizing them. We surely had plenty of ballast in us
now, and took cheerfully all the hard westerly had to give us, and
foamed along. Foamed? We wallowed--like a couple of sailing submarines
almost. In that wind and sea, with all that loose water sloshing around
her deck, there was no careless standing around of course; but with
rubber boots to your hips, a good oil-slicker to your back, and yourself
lashed to something solid up to wind'ard, it was a great place for a man
to let the wind blow away three months of coal-dust from his eyelids;
and what the wind couldn't blow away th