Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/119

 Ark, did not people like Jonathan Adams have the courage, sometimes, to build something new. No, the West Wind is going to teach all the shipmasters something they never knew before, when once she sets sail. And we expect to clear for Gibraltar in less than a month. Why, Miranda, you're not crying?"

"No," declared Miranda, choking bravely, for tears have no place in a sea captain's household. She even managed to muster a watery smile. "I wonder what you will leave behind you in foreign parts this time, your gold snuffbox, perhaps."

It was a longstanding joke that young Captain Reynolds was so careless of his possessions that he never came home from a voyage without having lost or mislaid by the way everything he had. But the gold snuffbox had survived several cruises, since it was the most valuable thing he owned. It had been presented to him by the citizens of his town when he had come home from sea some years ago, after, so he expressed, "a miserable Algerine pirate lay alongside him and insisted on being taken."

It is probably only a short paragraph in your history book and possibly a very dull one that tells you how, a little more than a hundred years ago, the seas swarmed with pirates whose home ports were the North African cities of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. The great nations of Europe and, with them, the