back, "From dis time always you call me 'Emil' mitout der 'Mister!'"




TO REPEL BOARDERS


"No; honest, now, Bob, I'm sure I was born too late. The twentieth
century's no place for me. If I'd had my way----"

"You'd have been born in the sixteenth," I broke in, laughing, "with
Drake and Hawkins and Raleigh and the rest of the sea-kings."

"You're right!" Paul affirmed. He rolled over upon his back on the
little after-deck, with a long sigh of dissatisfaction.

It was a little past midnight, and, with the wind nearly astern, we were
running down Lower San Francisco Bay to Bay Farm Island. Paul Fairfax
and I went to the same school, lived next door to each other, and
"chummed it" together. By saving money, by earning more, and by
each of us foregoing a bicycle on his birthday, we had collected
the purchase-price of the _Mist_, a beamy twenty-eight-footer,
sloop-rigged, with baby topsail and centerboard. Paul's father was a
yachtsman himself, and he had conducted the business for us, poking
around, overhauling, sticking his penknife into the timbers, and testing
the planks with the greatest care. In fact, it was on his schooner,
the _Whim_, that Paul and I had picked up what we knew about
boat-sailing, and now that the _Mist_ was ours, we were hard at
work adding to our knowledge.