on the main-lower-topsail. How
far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?"

"Let me see . . . the _Lallah Rookh_." Mr. Pike paused to consider. "Oh,
say around a hundred feet."

"I saw it myself. One of the green hands, a tramp--and he must already
have got a taste of Mr. Harding--fell off the lower-topsail-yard. I was
only a little girl, but it looked like certain death, for he was falling
from the weather side of the yard straight down on deck. But he fell
into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall, turned a somersault,
and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt. And he landed right alongside
of Mr. Harding, facing him. I don't know which was the more astonished,
but I think Mr. Harding was, for he stood there petrified. He had
expected the man to be killed. Not so the man. He took one look at Mr.
Harding, then made a wild jump for the rigging and climbed right back up
to that topsail-yard."

Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard me
say:

"Astonishing! Think of the jar to the man's nerves, falling to apparent
death that way."

"He'd been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess," was Mr. Pike's
remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.

Which was all very well in a way. Ships were ships, and judging by what
I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary. But that a
young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of such things and
be so saturated in this side of ship life was not nice. It was not nice
for me, though it interested me, I confess,--and strengthened my grip on
reality. Yet it meant a hardening of one's fibres, and I did not like to
think of Miss West being so hardened.

I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and
firmness of her skin. Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which
were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes. Gray her eyes
were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression, intelligent
and alive. Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most noteworthy
expression of it was a great calm. She seemed always in repose, at peace
with herself and with the external world. The most beautiful feature was
her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows and hair. The most
admirable feature was her nose, quite straight, very straight, and just
the slightest trifle too long. In this it was reminiscent of her
father's nose. But the perfect modelling o