Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/118

 and halyard," Humphrey would say, "and you never even knew if you could build her. What a dreamer you are!"

"It takes dreaming to keep a man at his work," Jonathan would answer. "How do you think I would have had the patience, all these years, to drive wooden pins into cross-timbers, or to mend the rigging of limping coastwise schooners if I had not been thinking of just such a ship as this, and seen her, in my mind's eye, putting to sea under full sail, to smash every sailing record that has been known?"

The day of the launching came, then the stepping of the giant masts, the completing of the rigging and the bending of the new sails.

"The West Wind will be ready for sea in two weeks now," Humphrey said, one morning at breakfast to Miranda Reynolds—she was my great-grandmother and I was named for her. They had been married only a month and this would be his first cruise since their wedding. She drew her breath quickly, she had not known it was to be so soon.

"People say," she began hesitatingly, "old sailors and longshoremen and even the Naval officers that have been here, say that the West Wind will never stand a storm."

"They are the kind of men," Humphrey scoffed, "who would be sailing vessels of the model of the