Nor did I ever learn what he and my father talked about after
I left them there together.
CHAPTER II
BILL HAYDEN
More than two-score years and ten have come and gone since that day when I,
Benjamin Lathrop, put out from Salem harbor, a green hand on the ship
Island Princess, and in them I have achieved, I think I can say with due
modesty, a position of some importance in my own world. But although
innumerable activities have crowded to the full each intervening year,
neither the aspirations of youth nor the successes of maturity nor the
dignities of later life have effaced from my memory the picture of myself,
a boy on the deck of the Island Princess in April, 1809.
I thought myself very grand as the wind whipped my pantaloons against my
ankles and flapped the ribbons of the sailor hat that I had pulled snugly
down; and I imagined myself the hero of a thousand stirring adventures in
the South Seas, which I should relate when I came back an able seaman at
the very least. Never was sun so bright; never were seas so blue; never was
ship so smart as the Island Princess.
On her black hull a nicely laid band of white ran sheer from stem to stern;
her bows swelled to meet the seas in a gentle curve that hinted the swift
lines of our clippers of more recent years.
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