“No, my lord,” said the old man, “we shall have to take as long a tack as we can to the south. There is a deal of west in the wind—more, I think, than there was an hour since. Castor and Pollux—I beg your lordship’s pardon, the blessed Saints—defend us from anything like a westerly gale.”
“Ah! old croaker,” replied the Count, with a laugh, “I verily believe that you will be half disappointed if we get to our journey’s end without some mishap.”
“Good words, good words, my lord,” said the old man, hastily crossing himself, while he muttered something, which, if it could have been overheard, would have been scarcely suitable to that act of devotion. “Heaven bring us safe to our journey’s end! Of course it is your lordship’s business to give orders, and ours to go to the bottom, if it is to be so. But I must say, saving your presence, that it is against all rules of a sailor’s craft as I have known it, man and boy, for nigh upon threescore years, to be at sea near about a month after the autumn equinox.
’Never let your keel be wet,
When the Pleiades have set;
Never let your keel be dry,
When the Crown is in the sky.’
That is what my father used to say, and his fathers before him, for I do not know how many generations, for we have always followed the sea.”
“Very well for them, perhaps,” said the Count, “in the days when a man would almost as soon go into a lion’s den as venture out of sight of land. But the world is too busy to let us waste half our year on shore.”
“Yes, yes, I know all about that,” answered the old man, who was privileged to have the last word even with so great a personage as the Count; “but there is a proverb, ‘Much haste, little speed,’ and I have always found it quite as true by sea as by land.”