"She seems to stand it very well."

And then another burst of an indignant voice:

"Any fool can carry sail on a ship--"

And so on and so on, the ship meanwhile rushing on her way with a
heavier list, a noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of the
white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to leeward. For the best of
it was that Captain S- seemed constitutionally incapable of giving
his officers a definite order to shorten sail; and so that
extraordinarily vague row would go on till at last it dawned upon
them both, in some particularly alarming gust, that it was time to
do something. There is nothing like the fearful inclination of
your tall spars overloaded with canvas to bring a deaf man and an
angry one to their senses.



XII.



So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship,
and her tall spars never went overboard while I served in her.
However, all the time I was with them, Captain S- and Mr. P- did
not get on very well together. If P- carried on "like the very
devil" because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was,
Captain S- (who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable
of ordering one of his officers to shorten sail) resented the