froze upon the shrouds and ratlines, and the captain said that no man
could lay out upon the top-sail yard, though the north-easter threatened
to blow the sail out of the bolt-ropes--but Ruggiero got hold of the lee
earing all the same and Sebastiano followed him, and the captain swore a
strange oath in the Italo-American language, and went aloft himself to
help light the sail out to windward, being still a young man and not
liking to be beaten by a couple of beardless boys, as the two were
then.[2] And they have seen many strange sights, sea-serpents not a few,
and mermaids quite beyond the possibility of mistake, and men who can
call the wind with four knots in a string and words unlearnable, and
others who can alter the course of a waterspout by a secret spell, and a
captain who made a floating beacon of junk soaked in petroleum in a
tar-barrel and set it adrift and stood up on the quarter-deck calling on
all the three hundred and sixty-five saints in the calendar out of the
Neapolitan almanack he held--and got a breeze, too, for his pains, as
Ruggiero adds with a quiet and somewhat incredulous smile when he has
finished the yarn. All these things they have seen with their eyes, and
many more which it is impossible to remember, but all equally
astonishing though equally familiar to everybody who has been at sea ten
years.

[Footnote 2: The writer knows of a Sorrentine captain, commanding a
large bark who, when top-sails are reefed in his watch regularly takes
the lee earing, which, as most landsmen need to be told, is the post of
danger and honour.]

And now in mid-June they are at home again, since Sorrento is their home
now, and they are inclined to take a turn with the pleasure boats by
way of a change and engage themselves for the summer, Ruggiero with a
gentleman from the north of Italy known as the Conte di San Miniato, and