midway. "No, I won't, either.
But I'll put Maurice wise to them. What should he know at his age and
with his up-bringing of what's in the heads of people like them. And
if I don't have something further to say to old Mr. Duncan! But now
let's go back to Arkell's--come on, Joe."

But I didn't go back with him. I didn't think that I could do Maurice
any good then, and I might be in the way if Clancy wanted to speak his
mind out to anybody. I went home instead, where I expected to have
troubles of my own, for I knew that my mother wouldn't like the idea
of my going seining.

VI

MAURICE BLAKE GETS A VESSEL

Three days after Johnnie Duncan fell out of Crow's Nest the new
Duncan vessel designed by Will Somers was towed around from Essex.
She had been named the Johnnie Duncan. I spent the best part of the
next three days watching the sparmakers and riggers at work on her.
And when they had done with her and she fit to go to sea, she did look
handsome. She had not quite the length of the new vessel of Sam
Hollis's, which lay at Withrow's dock just below her, and that
probably helped to give her a more powerful look to people that
compared them. Too able-looking altogether to be real fast, some
thought, to hold the Withrow vessel in anything short of a gale, but
I didn't feel so sure she wouldn't sail in a moderate breeze, too.
I had seen her on the stocks, and knew the beautiful lines below the
water-mark. And she was going to carry the sail to drive her. I took
particular pains to get the measurements of her mainmast while it
lay on the dock under the shears. It was eighty-seven feet--and
she only a hundred and ten feet over all--and it stepped plumb in
the middle of her, further forward than a mainmast was generally put
in a fisherman. To that was shackled a seventy-five foot boom, and
eighty-odd tons of pig-iron were cemented close down to her keel, and
that floored over and stanchioned snug. For the rest, she was very
narrow forward, as I think I said--everybody said she'd never stand
the strain of her fore-rigging when they got to driving her on a
long passage. And she carried an ungodly bowsprit--thirty-seven feet
outboard--easily the longest bowsprit out of Gloucester. Topmasts to
match, and there was some sail to drive a vessel. But she had the
hull for it, full and yet easy, with the greatest beam pretty well
aft of the mainmast, and she drew fifteen and a half feet of water.

I was still looking her ov