weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and
that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell
his ego. Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as
third mate before the Old Man promoted him.

For a year, Matt Peasley did nicely; then, in a gale off the Orinoco
River, with the captain too ill to appear on deck, the first mate went
by the board, leaving the command of the ship to young Matt. She was
dismasted at the time, but the lad brought her into Rio on the stumps,
thus attracting some little attention to himself from his owners, who
paid his passage back to Portland by steamer and found a second mate's
berth for him in one of their clipper ships bound round the Horn.

Of course Matt was too young to know they had their eyes on him for
future skipper material and were sending him around Cape Horn for the
invaluable experience he would encounter on such a voyage. All he
realized was that he was going round the Horn, as became one of the
House of Peasley, no member of which would ever regard him as a real
sailor until he could point to a Cape Horn diploma as evidence that he
had graduated from the school for amateurs.

Matt Peasley lacked two months of his twentieth birthday when he
stepped onto a San Francisco dock, in his pocket a highly
complimentary discharge as second mate from the master of the clipper
ship--for Matt had elected to quit. In fact, he had to, for on the
way round the mate had picked on him and called him Sonny and Mother's
Darling Boy; and Matt, having, in the terminology of the forecastle,
come aboard through the hawse pipes, knew himself for a man and a
sailor, despite the paucity of whiskers on his big, square boyish
chin.