Many many years ago seem like yesterday, and I hope it will always be
the same. For, just to be serious for a moment, what is the full
stretch of the oldest man's life to time? Just one star-wink, if the
astronomers are right about the passage of light, and that the glitter
of stars that we see now are only the rays which started from them away
there in space long before we were born.
Don't be frightened, I'm not going to talk astronomy, but about my old
ship, the first I ever sailed in, after having a kind of training in my
father's little yachts, beginning with the shoulder-of-mutton sail; and
next with the Cornish lugger, which he bought at Newlyn, on beyond
Penzance, when Penwalloc went wrong, and his two boats with all their
gear, and about two miles of drift mackerel and pilchard nets, were sold
by auction.
Father bought the _Brine_, and had her decked and newly rigged, and
many's the cruise I had with him and old Tom Sanders, we three managing
the two big sails well enough. After that came the cutter, when we had
to have two men and a boy, for the mainsail was pretty big to manage,
and took some hauling and setting in a breeze, and some strength to
tackle in one of the squalls that come rushing out of the gullies and
combes down along our Cornish coast, where the great peninsula or
promontory, or whatever you call it, is scored across and across almost
from sea to sea with deep valleys; just as you see a loin of pork cut
with a sharp knife before it is put down to roast.
There, I'm not going to talk about Cornwall this time, but my adventures
on the high seas in the Burgh Castle.