Another brand-new schooner, the William D’Arcy, tied up at our lumber wharf this last spring, and lay there for nearly a week. We all went on board her. She lay at the sheltered side of the wharf, out of the cold wind, and the sun poured down on her. The smell of salt and cordage was so strong that you could almost feel the lift of her bows to the swell, but there she lay, as quiet as if she had never lifted to a wave at all. The men were at work at various jobs; no one was in a hurry; it plainly made no difference whether they were two days at the wharf or ten.
The bulwarks and outside fittings, anchors, hawsers, and hawse-holes, seemed wonderfully large to our landsman eyes, and the inside fittings, lockers, etc., as wonderfully small and compact. The enormous masts were of new yellow Oregon pine.
The Captain welcomed us hospitably, and took us down into his cabin, which was fitted with shelves, lockers, and cupboards, neat and compact, all brand-new and shining with varnish. There was a shelf of books, the table had a red cover and reading lamp, and the wife’s work-basket stood on it, with some mending. She had gone “upstreet” for her marketing.
“Oh,” said one of us, “it looks so homelike and cozy!”
The Captain looked round it complacently, but with remembering eyes that spoke of many things. He had been cruising all winter.
“It looks so to you,” he said, “but often it ain’t.”
CHAPTER III—THE BANKS OF THE RIVER
The river-bank boys pick up, as easily as they breathe, knowledge as miscellaneous as the drift piled on the shores. They know all the shoals and principal eddies, without the aid of buoys. They know the ways and seasons of the different fish. They learn to recognize the owner’s marks on the logs, and they know the times and ways of all the humbler as well as the larger river craft, the scows and smacks, and the “gundalows” which spend mysterious month after month hauled up among the sedges at the mouths of the streams. Their own row-boats are heavy, square at both ends, and clumsy to row, but as I have said, they are out in them in the spring before the floating ice is out of the river, rescuing logs and fragments of lumber from between the ice-cakes.