as he for his years that the Old Man took a shine
to him. Confidentially he informed young Matt that if the latter would
stay by the ship, in due course a billet as third mate should be the
reward of his fealty. The Old Man didn't need a third mate any more than
he needed a tail, but Matt Peasley looked like a comer to him and he
wanted an excuse to encourage the boy by berthing him aft; also it
sounds far better to be known as a third mate instead of a mate's bosun,
which was, in reality, the position the Old Man had promised Matt. The
latter promptly agreed to this program and the skipper loaned him his
copy of Bowditch.

Upon his return from his first voyage as third mate Matt went up for his
second mate's certificate and passed very handily. Naturally he expected
prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of experience in a
second mate--also the value of years and physical weight; so he informed
young Matt he was entirely too precocious and that to sail as second
mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell his ego. Consequently
Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as third mate before the Old
Man promoted him.

For a year, Matt Peasley did nicely; then, in a gale off the Orinoco
River, with the captain too ill to appear on deck, the first mate went
by the board, leaving the command of the ship to young Matt. She was
dismasted at the time, but the lad brought her into Rio on the stumps,
thus attracting some little attention to himself from his owners, who
paid his passage back to Portland by steamer and found a second mate's
berth for him in one of their clipper ships bound round the Horn.

Of course Matt was too young to know they had their eyes on him for
future skipper material and were sending him around Cape Horn for
the invaluable experience he would encounter on such a voyage. All he
realized was that he was going round the Horn, as became one of the
House of Peasley, no member of which would ever regard him as a real
sailor until he could point to a Cape Horn diploma as evidence that he
had graduated from the school for amateurs.

Matt Peasley lacked two months of his twentieth birthday when he
stepped onto a San Francisco dock, in his pocket a highly complimentary
discharge as second mate from the master of the clipper ship--for Matt
had elected to quit. In fact, he had to, for on the way round the mate
had picked on him and called him Sonny and Mother's Darling Boy; and
Matt, having, in th