and even pityingly at ours. Then, perchance, they have joined in a club
cruise from San Francisco to Mare Island. They found the morning run up
the Bay delightful. In the afternoon, when the brave west wind ramped
across San Pablo Bay and they faced it on the long beat home, things were
somewhat different. One by one, like a flight of swallows, our more
meagrely sparred and canvassed yachts went by, leaving them wallowing and
dead and shortening down in what they called a gale but which we called a
dandy sailing breeze. The next time they came out, we would notice their
sticks cut down, their booms shortened, and their after-leeches nearer
the luffs by whole cloths.

As for excitement, there is all the difference in the world between a
ship in trouble at sea, and a small boat in trouble on land-locked water.
Yet for genuine excitement and thrill, give me the small boat. Things
happen so quickly, and there are always so few to do the work--and hard
work, too, as the small-boat sailor knows. I have toiled all night, both
watches on deck, in a typhoon off the coast of Japan, and been less
exhausted than by two hours' work at reefing down a thirty-foot sloop and
heaving up two anchors on a lee shore in a screaming southeaster.

Hard work and excitement? Let the wind baffle and drop in a heavy tide-
way just as you are sailing your little sloop through a narrow
draw-bridge. Behold your sails, upon which you are depending, flap with
sudden emptiness, and then see the impish wind, with a haul of eight
points, fill your jib aback with a gusty puff. Around she goes, and
sweeps, not through the open draw, but broadside on against the solid
piles. Hear the roar of the tide, sucking through the trestle. And hear
and see your pretty, fresh-painted boat crash against the piles. Feel
her stout little hull give to the impact. See the rail actually pinch
in. Hear your canvas tearing, and see the black, square-ended timbers