Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/53

Rh what he knows to some one who will do him credit some day? Yes, we will build you a model and she shall be called the Josephine,  after the first ship I ever sailed in; the finest  one that ever crossed the seas.”

As Billy finally took his way homeward, his mind was a seething mass of nautical terms  which he vainly tried to set in order.

“The gaff holds the top of the mainsail,” he was saying to himself, “and the jib-boom—”

Here he was obliged to interrupt the repetition of his lesson by laughing aloud at the memory of his last view of Captain Saulsby. Harvey Jarreth had been waiting at the cottage, true to his word, so that Billy’s final sight of the two had shown him the little eager  man still pouring out a flood of argument,  while the Captain sat unconcernedly darning  his blue sock once more, and whistling as gaily  as though Jarreth and his real-estate project  were a thousand miles away.

However, just before Billy passed out through the gap in the wall, he saw something  that drove both lesson and laughter completely  from his mind. He had stopped to take one more look at the little house, the sloping gar-