Thus the Island Princess fell off by the head, as we
catted and fished the anchor; then took the wind in her sails and slipped
slowly out toward the open sea.
Aft, by the lee rail, I saw Roger Hamlin watching the group, a little apart
from the others, where my own people had gathered. My father stood half a
head above the crowd, and beside him were my mother and my sister. When I,
too, looked back at them, my father waved his hat and I knew his eyes were
following me; I saw the flutter of white from my mother's hand, and I knew
that her heart was going out with me to the uttermost parts of the earth.
Then, almost timidly, my sister waved her handkerchief. But I saw that she
was looking at the quarter-deck.
As land fell astern until it became a thin blue line on the western
horizon, and as the Island Princess ran free with the wind full in her
sails, I took occasion, while I jumped back and forth in response to the
mate's quick orders, to study curiously my shipmates in our little kingdom.
Now that we had no means of communication with that already distant shore,
we were a city unto ourselves.
Yonder was the cook, a man as black as the bottom of his iron pot, whose
frown, engraved deeply in his low forehead, might have marked him in my
eyes as the villain of some melodrama of the sea, had I not known him for
many years to be one of the most generous darkies, so far as hungry small
boys were concerned, that ever ruled a galley.
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