had prepared their wedding supper there....

At a quarter before ten o'clock the next morning, the _Nathan Ross_ went
out with the tide. When she had cleared the dock and was fairly in the
stream, Joel gave her in charge of Jim Finch; and he and Priscilla stood
in the after house, astern, and looked back at the throng upon the pier
until the individual figures merged into a black mass, pepper-and-salted
with color where the women stood. They could see the handkerchiefs
flickering, until a turn of the channel swept them out of sight of the
town, and they drifted on through the widening mouth of the bay, toward
the open sea. At dusk that night, there was still land in sight behind
them and on either side; but when Priscilla came on deck in the morning,
there was nothing but blue water and laughing waves. And so she was
homesick, all that day, and laughed not at all till the evening, when the
moon bathed the ship in silver fire, and the white-caps danced all about
them.

The _Nathan Ross_ was in no sense a lovely ship. There was about her none
of the poetry of the seas. She was designed strictly for utility, and for
hard and dirty toil. Blunt she was of bow and stern, and her widest point
was just abeam the foremast, so that she had great shoulders that
buffeted the sea. These shoulders bent inward toward the prow and met in
what was practically a right angle; and her stern was cut almost straight
across, with only enough overhang to give the rudder room. Furthermore,
her masts had no rake. They stood up stiff and straight as sore thumbs;
and the bowsprit, instead of being something near horizontal, rose toward
the skies at an angle close to forty-five degrees. This bowsprit made the
_Nathan Ross_ look as though she had just stubbed her toe. She carried
four boats at the davits; and two spare craft, bottom up, on the
boathouse just forward of the mizzenmast. Three of the four at the davits
were on the starboard side, and since they were each thirty feet long,
while the ship herself was scarce a hundred and twenty, they gave her a
sadly cluttered and overloaded appearance. For the rest, she was painted
black, with a white checkerboarding around the rail; and her sails were
smeared and smutty with smoke from burning blubber scraps.

Nevertheless, she was a comfortable ship, and a dry one. She rode waves
that would have swept a vessel cut on prouder lines; and she was
moderately steady. She was not fast, nor cared to be. An