oomy.
A man could stand upright in the cabin, and what with the stove,
cooking-utensils, and bunks, we were good for trips in her of a week at
a time. And we were just starting out on the first of such trips, and it
was because it was the first trip that we were sailing by night. Early
in the evening we had beaten out from Oakland, and we were now off the
mouth of Alameda Creek, a large salt-water estuary which fills and
empties San Leandro Bay.

"Men lived in those days," Paul said, so suddenly as to startle me from
my own thoughts. "In the days of the sea-kings, I mean," he explained.

I said "Oh!" sympathetically, and began to whistle "Captain Kidd."

"Now, I've my ideas about things," Paul went on. "They talk about
romance and adventure and all that, but I say romance and adventure are
dead. We're too civilized. We don't have adventures in the twentieth
century. We go to the circus----"

"But----" I strove to interrupt, though he would not listen to me.

"You look here, Bob," he said. "In all the time you and I've gone
together what adventures have we had? True, we were out in the hills
once, and didn't get back till late at night, and we were good and
hungry, but we weren't even lost. We knew where we were all the time. It
was only a case of walk. What I mean is, we've never had to fight for
our lives. Understand? We've never had a pistol fired at us, or a
cannon, or a sword waving over our heads, or--or anything....

"You'd better slack away three or four feet of that main-sheet," he said
in a hopeless sort of way, as though it did not matter much anyway. "The
wind's still veering around.

"Why, in the old times the sea was one constant glorious adventure,"
he continued. "A boy left school and became a midshipman, and in a few
weeks was cruising after Spanish galleons or locking yard-arms with a
French privateer, or--doing lots of things."

"Well--there _are_ adventures today," I objected.

But Paul went on as though I had not spoken:

"And today we go from school to high school, and from high school to
college, and then we go into the office or become doctors and things,
and the only adventures we know about are the ones we read in books.
Why, just as sure as I'm sitting here on the stern of the sloop
_Mist_, just so sure am I that we wouldn't know what to do if a
real adventure came along. Now, would we?"

"Oh, I don't know," I answered non-committally.

"Well, you wouldn't be a coward, would you?"