A moment she stood irresolute as if half fearing to test their luck the third time. She turned the star fish over and over in her hand, then, as if she thought waiting useless, she tossed it lightly up.
"Oo—oo! Look! Look Pa!" she cried, "It's right side up! Pa, I do believe the vessel will come in safely. My! Wouldn't it have been awful if the star fish had fallen the other side up?"
"My little Sprite is a great comfort," he said, "and the tossing of the star fish is harmless fun, but I'd not like to think that you'd believe all the superstitious yarns that the sailors tell."
"Oh, no," was the earnest reply. "I know that some of them could not be true, but there's one funny one that a sailor down on the pier told yesterday.
"He said you could go down stairs backwards after dark, and look into a mirror you held in your hand, and see something, I don't know what, but I'm going to try it. I'll try it just to know what I'd see, or to find out what would happen. He said something was sure, just sure to happen."
"The something that would happen would be that you'd fall, and perhaps break your pretty neck," Captain Seaford said, "but as to what you'd see in the glass! Why, that is all nonsense. Here and there is a sailor that's as full of such silly notions as a weather vane.
"That sort of sailor listens to all the yarns he hears, believes them all, tells them all, and generally he isn't any too careful to tell them just as he heard them.
"He's apt to add just a little of his own nonsense to the yarn he heard to make it interesting."