From mainmast heel to truck,
from ensign halyard to tip of flying jib-boom, her well-proportioned masts
and spars and taut rigging stood up so trimly in one splendidly
cooerdinating structure, that the veriest lubber must have acknowledged her
the finest handiwork of man.
It was like a play to watch the men sitting here and there on deck, or
talking idly around the forecastle, while Captain Whidden and the chief
mate conferred together aft. I was so much taken with it all that I had no
eyes for my own people who were there to see me off, until straight out
from the crowded wharf there came a young man whom I knew well. His gray
eyes, firm lips, square chin, and broad shoulders had been familiar to me
ever since I could remember.
As he was rowed briskly to the ship, I waved to him and called out, "O
Roger--ahoy!"
I thought, when he glanced up from the boat, that his gray eyes twinkled
and that there was the flutter of a smile on his well-formed lips; but he
looked at me and through me and seemed not to see me, and it came over me
all at once that from the cabin to the forecastle was many, many times the
length of the ship.
With a quick survey of the deck, as if to see who had spoken, yet seeming
not to see me at all, Roger, who had lived all his life within a cable's
length of the house where I was born, who had taught me to box the compass
before I learned my ABC's, whose interest in my own sister had partly
mystified, partly amused her younger brother--that very Roger climbed
aboard the Island Princess and went on into the cabin without word or sign
of recognition.
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