“Captain Saulsby,” he said, “what were you captain of? Was it in the Navy or just of the Josephine?”
“Bless you, no; not in the Navy or of the Josephine, either,” replied his friend. “The Josephine was the first ship I ever sailed on when I was an apprentice boy, and the captain of her was such a great man that he hardly knew I was on board. No, I wasn’t captain of the Josephine.”
“Well,” insisted Billy, not to be put off, “what ship were you captain of?”
Captain Saulsby heaved a great sigh and was silent for a long time. He took up the little model from his knee and turned it over and over before he spoke.
“No, not of the Josephine,” he said again, “although I fully intended to be. Do you see that little catboat riding at anchor down by the wharf; the old, old grey one that’s needed a coat of paint these two years past and a new sail for at least five? Well, that’s the only craft that Ned Saulsby ever was skipper of, or ever will be.”
He made this statement very abruptly and fell immediately to work on stepping a mast of the little vessel.
“There’s a lot of kind-hearted folks in the world,” he went on after a pause, “and some of them started calling me ‘Captain’ about the time my rheumatism got so bad that I could never go to sea again. They thought giving me the name would make me feel better, and I guess it did, perhaps. When you’ve followed the sea since you were hardly more than so high, and suffered by it, won and lost by it, hated it and loved it, why it’s not easy to find out, all of a sudden, that you’ve got to stop on shore for all the rest of your days.”
Billy would have pursued the subject further, but the old man changed the course of the talk. He took up the model of the Josephine and set it down upon the doorstep beside the boy.
“Now, young fellow,” he said cheerily, “suppose you name over these ropes as far as we have gone, and we’ll see if you are as much of a landlubber as you were when you came here a week ago.”
Billy, nothing loth, took up the challenge and went through his lesson with great credit, making nothing of naming the parts of the rigging of the little schooner and of running off lightly many terms that had so lately been pure Greek to him.