"'No,' says Dan, 'but we c'n make a holiday of it.'
"'I don' know about that,' says the skipper. 'If it moderates at all, I cal'late to be pullin' out by daybreak.'
"'Sure, and we c'n have a celebration that'll reverber-r-ate in history by then,' says Dan.
"Now, Dan was a great reader. He'd lie in his bunk of a night when he had no watch to stand and he'd read the morning up sometimes, and now when he starts rowing again he starts talking about things he'd read.
"'I used to read about the holidays that some countries have,' says Dan, 'but I never believed it till I was in a vessel running salt fish to Cadiz one time. And the ship-loads o' salt fish they consume in that country, 'twould amaze you. But one night layin' in Cadiz harbor a big whale of a steamer cut into us, and all the topside planking she left of us to starb'd not even this new cook of ours—and God knows he's savin' enough of the raw material!—he couldn't have started a galley fire with it. We had to run her up on the railway and calk her, and after that 'twas the carpenters—nine weeks in all—and 'twas great opportunities we had to study the customs of the country. And there was a country for you! Every once in a quick while a holiday. And the days they did work no one breaking his neck to get the work done. 'Twas proof to me they must be people o' genius to get ahead at all. But then they do say the people that does the least work has the most genius, the most imagination; and imagination, they say, is the first qualification of genius, and too much work it kills the imagination. What d'y'think o' that doctrine, skipper?' says Dan.
"'I don't know nothing about imagination,' says the skipper, 'but I alwuz notices that them that does the least work c'n get off the most hot air.'
"Just then we bump into the dock, where the skipper, without even waiting to see the painter made fast, hurries up toward the street.
"'There he goes,' says Dan, 'lookin' for—what they call 'em, now?—affinities. And if he only had a little taste in the matter! There's people, they say, that all vessels look alike to—sharp-built and round-bowed, light-sparred and heavy. And he's that way with women. One looks just like any other to him. The gray-headed old rat, he has sons as old as me or you at home, Jack, and there's the widow Simmons in Gloucester with two lodging-houses at the head o' the harbor. He's courting her, too.'
"'From what I hear, Dan,' says I, 'the widow is able for him.'
"At the head of the dock was a lobster factory with a pile of cooked lobsters under a shed half as high as our masthead. 'Here's our supper, boy,' says Dan, and we go up to a man and ask how much for lobsters, and he says: 'Help yourselves for fifty cents a dozen.' And we help ourselves. I had one dozen and Dan two. 'And couldn't we get a little drop o' something to follow after these red gentry?' asks Dan, and the man calls a boy, and Dan gives the boy a five-dollar bill, and when the boy comes back with a dozen pint bottles of English ale, he tells him to keep the change, the ale looked so good to him.