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Once he accompanied such a group to that part of the harbour where tall-masted fullriggers with foreign flags lay nose by stern in unbroken line along the quay. Strange odours, fragrant or repulsive, filled the air. Jolly, loud-voiced men toiled mightily or lounged like monarchs among piles of casks and bags and boxes.
He had hardly formed the thought when from quite up in the zenith down into the depths of the sea the arch of heaven seemed to open out in a sharp jagged line of vivid blue light, shutting again instantaneously, and the boy knelt gazing before him in wonder, for there, about a mile away, with every spar and yard and rope standing out black against the blue light, was the picture the model, it seemed to him to be of a tall-masted brig sitting motionless upon the water; and then it was gone.
It led her through a pleasant area of second-growth fir, slender offspring of the slaughtered forest monarchs, whose great stumps dotted the roll of the land, and up on a little rise whence she could overlook the city and the inlet where rode the tall-masted ships and sea-scarred tramps from deep salt water. And for the time being she was content.
In the thinks he conjured up there, it was also his railroad station, for he traveled far and wide from it on trains that went puffing away from that little house built at the top of the stairs; and it was his wharf, to which tall-masted ships came with the swift quiet of so many pigeons.
Just then there was a faint sound as of creaking cordage from beyond the side. Jeremy's bunk was near the open port and by leaning over a little he could see the river. Barely a boat's length away, in the dark, a tall-masted, schooner-rigged craft was slipping past on the outgoing tide, with not so much as a harbor-light showing.
But the funny thing is, you can't bear to shut your eyes for a single minute for fear of missing a tree, or a mound, or one of those tall-masted gyassas loaded with white and pink pottery: they all seem so ridiculously important, somehow! Then, there's that bothersome north wind following you, and trying to freeze your spine, unless you pounce on the best seat where it can't reach.
As a Western man, brought up by inland rivers, he was fascinated and thrilled by the tall-masted seagoing ships, and he felt a strange sense of the remoter mysterious ocean, which he had never seen. But he was impressed and startled by smartly dressed men and women, the passing of carriages, and a sudden conviction that he was strange and foreign to what he saw.
As the pirate sloop raced southward under full sail, the form of the other ship became steadily plainer. She was a brig, high-pooped, and tall-masted, and apparently deeply laden. Major Bonnet, who had come up at the first warning, seemed his old cool self as he conned the enemy through a spyglass.
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