With a sail-yard for each blast,
And each thing in its kind.
With topmast high and bowsprit,
With cords and ropes I hold all fit
To sail forth at the next weete [tide]
This ship is at an end.”
The ark, now finished by the pretended labours of the men, Noah turned to his wife and family.
“Wife” (he said), “in this castle we shall be kept;
My children and thou I would in leaped.”
But Noah’s wife immediately began to show her temper. She had been looking all the time with scorn upon the building of the ship, and laughing with her neighbours, or “gossips,” as she called them, to see her husband and her sons working, as she considered, so foolishly; and when Noah begged her to come into safety, this was her contemptuous answer: