“Ah, you don’t mean the same as I do. I mean, make it your living and not your dying.”
“Oh, I see.”
“You wouldn’t want,” continued the skipper, “to go out at times that might mean having them as you left at home standing on the shore looking out to sea for a boat as would never come back.”
“No,” said the boy, with something like a sigh. “I know what you mean. Ah, it has been very horrible sometimes, and all those little churchyards at the different villages about the coast with that regular ‘Drowned at sea’ over and over and over again.”
“Right, my lad. Things go wrong sometimes; but that’s what makes sailors and fishermen get to learn what the moon says and the sun and the clouds, and the bit of haze that gathers sometimes off the coast means. Why, if you’d looked out yesterday afternoon when the wind went down and the glint of sunshine come out, there was a nasty dirty look in the sky. You wait a bit and keep your eyes open, and put that and that together, and as you grow up you’ll find that it isn’t so hard as you’d think to say what the weather is going to be to-morrow. You’ll often be wrong, same as I am.”
“Ah! then I shall begin at once,” cried Rodd eagerly, as he looked sharply round. “Well, it can’t go on pelting down like this with hail coming now and then in showers. Showers come and go.”
“Right!” said the skipper, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Oh!” cried Rodd sharply.
“Hullo! Why, you don’t mean to say that hurt?”
“Hurt! No,” cried Rodd, shaking his head violently. “You shot a lot of cold water right up into my ear.”