r.

I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches around the chest.
Also, I had lived clean, and worked and played hard. I got over the
fever finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but--alive. Thanks to
the college, my hospital care had cost nothing. It was a good thing: I
had just seven dollars in the world.

The yacht Ella lay in the river not far from my hospital windows. She
was not a yacht when I first saw her, nor at any time, technically,
unless I use the word in the broad sense of a pleasure-boat. She was a
two-master, and, when I saw her first, as dirty and disreputable as are
most coasting-vessels. Her rejuvenation was the history of my
convalescence. On the day she stood forth in her first coat of white
paint, I exchanged my dressing-gown for clothing that, however loosely
it hung, was still clothing. Her new sails marked my promotion to
beefsteak, her brass rails and awnings my first independent excursion
up and down the corridor outside my door, and, incidentally, my return
to a collar and tie.

The river shipping appealed to me, to my imagination, clean washed by
my illness and ready as a child's for new impressions: liners gliding
down to the bay and the open sea; shrewish, scolding tugs; dirty but
picturesque tramps. My enthusiasm amused the nurses, whose ideas of
adventure consisted of little jaunts of exploration into the abdominal
cavity, and whose aseptic minds revolted at the sight of dirty sails.

One day I pointed out to one of them an old schooner, red and brown,
with patched canvas spread, moving swiftly down the river before a
stiff breeze.

"Look at her!" I exclaimed. "There goes adventure, mystery, romance!
I should like to be sailing on her."

"You would have to boil the drinking-water," she replied dryly. "And
the ship is probably swarming with rats."

"Rats," I affirmed, "add to the local color. Ships are their native
habitat. Only sinking ships don't have them."

But her answer was to retort that rats carried bubonic plague, and to
exit, carrying the sugar-bowl. I was ravenous, as are all convalescent
typhoids, and one of the ways in which I eked out my still slender diet
was by robbing the sugar-bowl at meals.

That day, I think it was, the deck furniture was put out on the
Ella--numbers of white wicker chairs and tables, with bright cushions
to match the awnings. I had a pair of ancient opera-glasses, as
obsolete as my amputating knives, and, like them,