“Ah, well, you won’t, my boy, for there’s everything to do first.”
“Everything to do?”
“Of course. It’s not like taking a few bottles and pill-boxes and a net or two to go up on the moor. Why, there’s our ship to find first, and then to get her fitted with our nets and sounding-lines and dredges and all sorts of odds and ends, with reserves and provisions for all that we lose. Then there’s to collect a crew.”
“Oh, there’ll be plenty of fellows down by the Barbican or hanging about down there who will jump at going.”
“Don’t you be so precious sanguine, my fine fellow. This will be all so fresh that the men won’t be so ready as you expect. The first thing a seaman will ask will be, ‘Where are we bound? What port?’”
“Well, uncle; tell them.”
“Tell them what I don’t know myself unless I say Port Nowhere on the High Seas! It will be all a matter of chance, Pickle, where we go and what we do, and I may as well say it now, if any one gets asking you what we are going to do, your answer is included in just these few words—We are going to explore.”
Rodd nodded in a short business-like way.
“All right, uncle; I’ll remember,” he cried promptly. “Then you are going to hire a ship and engage a crew?”
“Well,” said Uncle Paul thoughtfully, “we are landsmen—I mean landsman and a boy—but we may as well begin to be nautical at once and call things by the sea-going terms. No, my boy, I am not going to engage a ship—too big.”