For three weeks the wind kept at east or north-east, always at a brisk breeze and freshening sometimes into half a gale¹. The Golden Rod sped merrily upon her way with every sail drawing, alow and aloft, so that by the end of the third week Amos and Ephraim Savage³ were reckoning out the hours before they would look upon their native land once more. To the old seaman⁴ who was used to meeting and to parting it was a small matter, but Amos, who had never been away before, was on fire with impatience⁵, and would sit smoking for hours with his legs astride the shank of the bowsprit, staring ahead at the skyline, in the hope that his friend’s reckoning had been wrong, and that at any moment he might see the beloved coast line looming⁷ up in front of him.

“It’s no use, lad,” said Captain Ephraim, laying his great red hand upon his shoulder. “They that go down to the sea in ships need a power of patience, and there’s no good eatin’ your heart out for what you can’t get.”

“There’s a feel of home about the air, though,” Amos answered. “It seems to whistle through your teeth with a bite to it that I never felt over yonder. Ah, it will take three months of the Mohawk Valley before I feel myself to rights.”

“Well,” said his friend, thrusting a plug of Trinidado tobacco into the corner of his cheek, “I’ve been on the sea since I had hair to my face, mostly in the coast trade, d’ye see, but over the water as well, as far as those navigation laws would let me. Except the two years that I came ashore⁸ for the King Philip business, when every man that could carry a gun was needed on the border, I’ve never been three casts of a biscuit from salt water, and I tell you that I never knew a better crossing than the one we have just made.”

“Ay, we have come along like a buck⁹ before a forest fire. But it is strange to me how you find your way so clearly out here with never track nor trail to guide you. It would puzzle me, Ephraim, to find America, to say

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