"'Faith, perhaps you're right. I kin see by the stow on yer mainsail and by the nate way yer heads'ls is drag-gen' in the wather that you're born and bled up to the sea and don't require no assistance.'
"With these sarcastic words he gave me his blessing, threw away the bottle, and disappeared again over the bow."
"I gather from your remarks that your friend was of Hibernian origin," said Margaret. "Perhaps a good dynamiter spoiled. But we will speak of him again. What I have been wanting for some time has been a trip in the canoe to the beach over there. I want to walk over the sand bar and get close to those great breakers rolling in on the shingle. Unhitch your canoe-string and bring the canoe alongside."
"Unhitch your canoe-string!" repeated Rankin contemptuously. "You must speak more nautically or I won't understand you."
"Well, what ought I to say?"
"Dunno. 'Cast adrift your towline' sounds well."
"It does, indeed," said Margaret, as Morry swung the light cockleshell into position and she descended into it with care. "'Cast adrift your towline' has a full, able-bodied seaman sort of sound; but it has not the charm of mystery about it that some expressions have. Now 'athwart your hawse' seems portentous in its meaning. I don't want to know what it means. I would rather go on thinking of it as of the arm that handed forth the sword Excalibur,' clothed in white samite—mystic, wonderful.' Do you know I read all Clark Russell's sea stories, and drive through all his sea-going technicalities with the greatest interest, although I understand nothing about them. When he goes aloft on the main-boom and brails up his foregaff-bobstay I go with him. Sometimes he describes how small the deck below looks from the dizzy height when, poised upon the capstan-bars, he furls the signal halyards that flap and fill away and thunder in the gale; and then I see it all—"
"So do I, so do I!" cried Morry, as he paddled dexterously to the shore. "You've got Clark Russell to a T. He goes on like that by the hour together. I read every word, and the beauty of it is I always think I understand. Why do we like his stories so much, I wonder?"
"One reason is because his heroes are manly men and have brave hearts," said Margaret confidently. "I think that is why they appeal to women; he always arouses a sentiment of pity for the hero's misfortunes. Few women can resist that." And Margaret, somewhat stirred, looked away over the broad sea. Almost unconsciously there flashed before her the image of a Greek god winning a foot-race under circumstances that aroused her sympathy. Again she saw him steering a yacht, keen, strong, active, determined, and calm amid excitement. A flush suffused her countenance, and her eyes became soft and thoughtful as she gazed far away. Ah, these rushes of blood to the head! How they kindle an unacknowledged idea into activity! A moment and, like a flash, a latent, undeveloped instinct becomes a living potent force to develop us. The admirer becomes a lover, the plotter a criminal, and the religious man a fanatic.
When the canoe pushed its way through the rushes and beached itself upon the soft sand the two jumped out and crossed over to the lake side, where the heavy ground swells of the last night's gale were still mounting high upon the shingle. The bar leading toward them from False Duck Island was a seething expanse of white breakers, and over the lake to the south and west, as far as the eye could reach in the now rarefied atmosphere a tumbling mass of bright-green waters could be seen, which grew blue in color at the sharply cut horizon. Not far off the "Bark Swaller" was buffeting her way to the southward, toward Oswego, and around the wooded island with the lighthouse on it, the mail steamer, twelve hours detained, was getting a first taste of the open water.