"Me, too," put in another cadet. "I'm going to make three hops down the gangway as soon as we tie up in New York."
"So I am the only cadet in this watch with sand enough to stick it out," said their elder. "You are a mushy lot, you are. I'm going on deck to find a man to talk to."
As the door slammed behind him, David Downes moodily observed:
"He has no ambition, that's what's the matter with him." But after a while David grew tired of the chatter and horse-play of the mess room and went on deck to think over the problem he must work out for himself. Was it lack of "sand" that made him ready to quit the calling he had longed for all his life? Would he not regret the chance after he had thrown it away? But the life around him was nothing at all like the pictures of his dreams, and he was too much of a boy to look beyond the present. His ideas of the sea were colored through and through by the memories of his father's career. He had come to hate this ugly steel monster crammed with coal and engines, which ate up her three thousand miles like an express train.
As he leaned against the rail, staring sadly out to sea, the sunlight flashed into snowy whiteness the distant royals and top-gallant sails of a square-rigger beating to the westward under a foreign flag. The boy's eyes filled with tears of genuine homesickness. Yonder was a ship worthy of the name, such as he longed to be in, but there was no place in her kind for him or his countrymen. A brown paw smote David's shoulder, and he turned to see the German bos'n. The cadet brushed a hand across his eyes, ashamed of his emotion, but the kind-hearted old seaman chuckled:
"Vat is it, Mister Downes? You vas sore on the skipper and the ship, so?"
David answered with a little break in his voice:
"It is all so different from what I expected, Peter."
"You stay mit us maybe a dozen or six voyages," returned the other, "and you guess again, boy. I did not t'ink you vas a quitter."