"I am!" Samuel said boldly.
"Apply the brush!"
When the bandage was removed from the victim's eyes, someone stood before him dressed like Neptune, with gray hair and beard and long white robes. In his right hand he held a trident; in his left hand the speaking-trumpet. In a sailor's hand was a paint brush that had been dipped in tar. With this thin tar Samuel was lathered, the tar being later removed with fat and oakum.
Neptune then said: "You may now become an able seaman. You may rise to boatswain and to captain. If you are killed or drowned, you will be turned into a sea-horse, and will be my subject. You may now eat salt pork, mush, and weevilly bread. Do it without grumbling. I now depart!"
Samuel was again blindfolded. When the bandage was removed, Neptune had disappeared. It was told Samuel that he had dashed over the bow into his sea-chariot.
"I know better now," Samuel explained to me. "Neptune was impersonated by Jim Thorn, our oldest sailor. His long beard was made of unraveled rope and yarn. He perched under the bow and climbed aboard by the chains."
My first turn at the wheel, with Samuel standing by, was a curious experience. Told to steer southwest, I found that I swung the wheel too far, and that the direction was south southwest. When I tried to swing back to southwest I went too far in the other direction, and was steering southwest by west. In a few hours, however, I had mastered the trick. I loved to steer. It enabled me to escape the dirty work of tarring, painting and cleaning. Yet I never took the helm without thinking of how my father had been killed at the wheel of the Hyder Ally.
Whistling aboard ship was a custom disliked by the old sailors. They entertained a superstition that he who whistled was "whistling for the wind." On one of my first nights at sea, feeling lonesome, I puckered my lips and began to blow a tune. Along came Samuel. He paused beside my berth.
"My boy," said he, "there are only two kinds of people who whistle. One is a boatswain. The other is a fool. You are not a boatswain."
He passed on. I never whistled again aboard ship.