mule's kick back of it.

As week after week passed, and the new hand revealed no temperamental
proclivities, no "kid-glove" inclinations, seemingly content with
washing down decks, lassooing pier bitts with the bight of a hawser at
a distance of ten feet, and hauling ash-buckets from the fireroom when
the blower was out of order--both of which last were made possible by
his mighty shoulders--the Captain began to take a different sort of
interest in him.

He allowed Dan to spend all his spare moments with him in the
pilot-house; and as the Captain could shoot the sun and figure latitude
and longitude and talk with fair understanding upon many other elements
of navigation, the young man's time was by no means wasted. Later, Dan
arranged with the director of a South Street night school of navigation
for the evenings when he was in port, and by the time they made him
mate of the _Hydrographer_, he was almost qualified to undergo
examination for his master's certificate.

Mental changes are not always attended by outward manifestations, but
all the crew of the _Hydrographer_, after that mad night off the
Virginia Capes, could see that something had hit the stalwart mate.
The edge seemed to be missing from his occasional moods of abandon;
sometimes he looked thoughtfully at a man without hearing what the man
was saying to him. But it did not impair his usefulness, and his
Captain could see indications of a better defined point in his
ambitions.

So that was the way things were with him when, on a gray December
afternoon, the day before Christmas, the _Hydrographer_, just arrived