“What, you aren’t afraid, are you?” Mr. Wing laughed that delightful laugh that so often accompanies fatness.
“Yes, I am,” admitted Aunt Min. “But don’t tell the girls or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Mr. Wing pointed to a two-master, with a black hull. “She is the schooner type and was built by a shipbuilder at Gloucester, so she is as sturdy as a Gloucester fisherman, but her yachty lines give her more speed. She’s got a big Lathrop engine in her that can kick her along at ten knots when our wind goes dead on her. She has been almost everywhere and is perfectly able to go anywhere she hasn’t been.”
It was perfectly plain to Aunt Min that boats and water were Mr. Wing’s hobby even though she hadn’t understood half of what he had said, particularly about kicking her along. What was the object in kicking her along if there was an engine?
“None of this fancy yachting for me,” went on the black yacht’s owner. “I’m my own sailing-master because half the fun of yachting to me is the work it entails. Why, I love the feel of the old ‘Boojum’ as she answers to wheel! And let me tell you she handles quick. She is alive, every inch of her.”
“Well, I hope there are plenty of life preservers in convenient places. Thank heavens, all the girls can swim well!” Aunt Min looked rather dubiously at the “Boojum” and at its owner.
Somehow the black hull upset her. It smacked of the piratical and she had visions of drawn cutlasses and bearded men with their heads wrapped up in red rags. It would have been better, she thought, if the boat had been white, as she imagined all yachts were.
“My dear Miss Pellew, it is safe as safe can be and dry as a bone. It takes days to get a drop in her bilges,” Mr. Wing hastened to assure her.
“What in the world could be the advantage of it taking days to get a drop in the bilges, and what did bilges have to do with life preservers, and what were bilges anyway?” thought Aunt Min. But she only said, “Well, that is very nice, I am sure.”