The four sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three
apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or
steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather
than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the
hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here
we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well
remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the
other Halsted. They were both of them smart, honest, bright lads,
coming well equipped and well educated from respectable homes, in love
with the calling of the sea, and resolved in time not only to command
ships, but to own them.
Well, nothing in any way noteworthy happened for many days. Though the
schooner was called the _Lightning_, she was by no means a clipper.
She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when
the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was
one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but
dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff;
would sit upright with erect spars, like the cocked ears of a horse,
in breezes which bowed passing vessels down to their wash-streaks.
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