Then the
conversation turned on the prohibitory Scott Act, which opened the vials
of the old man's wrath, for making "the biggest lot of hypocrites and
law-breakers and unlicensed shebeens and drunkards the country had ever
seen." The schoolmaster, as in duty bound, tried to defend the Act, but
all in vain, so he was glad to change the subject and discuss the crops,
politics, and education. This conversation took place at what the
captain called "the hellum", against the tiller of which he occasionally
allowed his apprentice to lean his back while he attended to other work.
Wilkinson was proud. This was genuine navigation, this steering a large
vessel with your back; any mere landsman, he now saw, could coil up
ropes like Coristine. The subject of this reflection was quite happy in
the bow, chumming with The Crew. Smoking their pipes together, Sylvanus
confided to his apprentice that a sailor's life was the lonesomest life
out of jail, when the cap'n was that quiet and stand off like as one he
knowed that wasn't far away, nuther. Coristine sympathized with him.
"The bossest time that ever was on this yere old _Susan Thomas_," he
continued, "was last summer wonst when the cap'n's niece, she come along
fer a trip.
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