y-five hundred pounds.
Where was I to begin? Maud stood silently by my side, while I evolved in
my mind the contrivance known among sailors as "shears." But, though
known to sailors, I invented it there on Endeavour Island. By crossing
and lashing the ends of two spars, and then elevating them in the air
like an inverted "V," I could get a point above the deck to which to make
fast my hoisting tackle. To this hoisting tackle I could, if necessary,
attach a second hoisting tackle. And then there was the windlass!

Maud saw that I had achieved a solution, and her eyes warmed
sympathetically.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Clear that raffle," I answered, pointing to the tangled wreckage
overside.

Ah, the decisiveness, the very sound of the words, was good in my ears.
"Clear that raffle!" Imagine so salty a phrase on the lips of the
Humphrey Van Weyden of a few months gone!

There must have been a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice,
for Maud smiled. Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all
things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham,
the overshading, the overtone. It was this which had given poise and
penetration to her own work and made her of worth to the world. The
serious critic, with the sense of humour and the power of expression,
must inevitably command the world's ear. And so it was that she had
commanded. Her sense of humour was really the artist's instinct for
proportion.

"I'm sure I've heard it before, somewhere, in books," she murmured
gleefully.

I had an instinct for proportion myself, and I collapsed forthwith,
descending from the dominant pose of a master of matter to a state of
humble confusion which was, to say the least, very miserable.

Her hand leapt out at once to mine.

"I'm so sorry," she said.

"No need to be," I gulped. "It does me good. There's too much of the
schoolboy in me. All of which is neither here nor there. What we've got
to do is actually and literally to clear that raffle. If you'll come
with me in the boat, we'll get to work and straighten things out."

"'When the topmen clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their
teeth,'" she quoted at me; and for the rest of the afternoon we made
merry over our labour.

Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the tangle.
And such a tangle--halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls, shrouds, stays,
all washed about and back and forth