with a wheel-barrow full of the rest of our food,--coffee, and bacon,
crackers, pork, eggs, butter, condensed milk (horrid stuff!) and two
or threee loaves of fresh bread. Oh, and I forgot threee dozen mince
turnovers, brought by Ed Mason.

The Captain snorted a little over the fresh bread and some of the
other things.

"If you'd ever had to live for months at a time on salt-hoss an'
hard tack, the same's I've done, you wouldn't bring soft bread on
a boat. It spiles in no time."

That did not seem to me a good argument, for if the Captain didn't
like to live on these things, why should he want us to bring them?
But I could see that Jimmy Toppan--who liked everything done
sailor-fashion--was rather fascinated by the idea of eating
nothing but ship's food. Ed Mason and I, however, had read the
books by Clark Russell, and we didn't want to eat biscuits full of
weevils, bad meat, and all the other unpleasant things they gave
to sailors. We agreed that salt horse, or fresh horse, either, did
not strike our fancy. Anyhow, we ate up the soft bread the first
day so we did not have to worry about it afterwards. We counted on
getting fish and clams for chowders, and probably some lobsters at
Duck Island.

By this time, Clarence was coming ashore in the tender. He did not
sit facing the stern, and pull with the oars as any ordinary
person would have done. Instead, he faced the bow, and used the
oars to push with. He had seen the Captain doing this, and, like
Jimmy, it was his aim to be as much of a sailor as possible. Why