e Crew. The schoolmaster felt that Wordsworth was not the
thing for the water; he should have brought Falconer or Byron. So he
stuck to the captain, who was a very intelligent man of his class, and
discussed with him the perils and advantages of lake navigation. They
neither of them smoked, nor, said the captain, did he often drink; when
he did, he liked to have it good. Thereupon Wilkinson produced what
remained in his flask, which his commanding officer took down neat at a
gulp, signifying, as he ruefully gazed upon the depleted vessel, that a
man might go long before he'd get such stuff as that. Then the
conversation turned on the prohibitory Scott Act, which opened the vials
of the old man's wrath, for making "the biggest lot of hypocrites and
law-breakers and unlicensed shebeens and drunkards the country had ever
seen." The schoolmaster, as in duty bound, tried to defend the Act, but
all in vain, so he was glad to change the subject and discuss the crops,
politics, and education. This conversation took place at what the
captain called "the hellum", against the tiller of which he occasionally
allowed his apprentice to lean his back while he attended to other work.
Wilkinson was proud. This was genuine navigation, this steering a large
vessel with your back; any mere landsman, he now saw, could coil up
ropes like Coristine. The subject of this reflection was quite happy in
the bow, chumming with The Crew. Smoking their pipes together, Sylvanus
confided to his apprentice that a sailor's life was the lonesomest life
out of jail, when the cap'n was that quiet and stand off like as one he
knowed that wasn't far away, nuther. Coristine sympathized with him.
"The bossest time that ever was on this yere old _Susan Thomas_," he
continued, "was last summer wonst when the cap'n's niece, she come along
fer a trip. There was another gal along with her, a regular stunner, she
was. Wot her name was I raley can't tell, 'cos that old owl of a cap'n,
whenever he'd speak to her, allers said Miss Do Please. I reckon that's
what she used to say to him, coaxin' like, and he kep' it up on her.
Well, we was becalmed three days right out on the lake, and I had to row
the blessed dingy in the bilin' sun over to Snake Island to get bread
and meat from the Snakes."

"From the snakes!" ejaculated Coristine, "why this beats Elijah's ravens
all to nothing."

"Oh, the Snakes is Injuns, and Miss Carmichael, that's the cap'n's gal,
says their rale