in and coiling while the engine clanks. And another way on smaller boats
is a sort of jack arrangement by which you give little jerks to a
ratchet and wheel, and at last It looses Its hold. Sometimes (in this
last way) It will not loose Its hold at all.

Then there is a way of which I proudly boast that it is the only way I
know, which is to go forward and haul at the line until It comes--or
does not come. If It does not come, you will not be so cowardly or so
mean as to miss your tide for such a trifle. You will cut the line and
tie a float on and pray Heaven that into whatever place you run, that
place will have moorings ready and free.

When a man weighs anchor in a little ship or a large one he does a jolly
thing! He cuts himself off and he starts for freedom and for the chance
of things. He pulls the jib a-weather, he leans to her slowly pulling
round, he sees the wind getting into the mainsail, and he feels that she
feels the helm. He has her on a slant of the wind, and he makes out
between the harbour piers. I am supposing, for the sake of good luck,
that it is not blowing bang down the harbour mouth, nor, for the matter
of that, bang out of it. I am supposing, for the sake of good luck to
this venture, that in weighing anchor you have the wind so that you can
sail with it full and by, or freer still, right past the walls until you
are well into the tide outside. You may tell me that you are so rich and
your boat is so big that there have been times when you have anchored in
the very open, and that all this does not apply to you. Why, then, your
thoughts do not apply to me nor to the little boat I have in mind.

In the weighing of anchor and the taking of adventure and of the sea
there is an exact parallel to anything that any man can do in the
beginning of any human thing, from his momentous setting out upon his