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Updated: May 4, 2025
"We're off," muttered Wilbur, as the "Bertha Millner" heeled to the first gust. But evidently the schooner was not bound up the bay. "Must be Vallejo or Benicia, then," hazarded Wilbur, as the sails grew tenser and the water rippled ever louder under the schooner's forefoot. "Maybe they're going after hay or wheat." The schooner was tacking, headed directly for Meiggs's wharf.
For, after all, any young man with the proper "pull" might have applied to Orlando G. Spence for the post of secretary, and even have penetrated as far as the great man's study; but that he, Hugh Millner, should not only have forced his way to this fastness, but have established, within a short half hour, his right to remain there permanently: well, this, if it proved anything, proved that the first rule of success was to know how to live up to one's principles.
Draper, dear lad, had the illusion of an "intellectual sympathy" between them; but that, Millner knew, was an affair of reading and not of character. Draper's temerities would always be of that kind; whereas his own well, his own, put to the proof, had now definitely classed him with Mr. Spence rather than with Mr. Spence's son.
It was a consequence of this new condition of his having thus distinctly and irrevocably classed himself that, when Draper at length brought upon the scene his shy shamble and his wistful smile, Millner, for the first time, had to steel himself against them instead of yielding to their charm.
Slowly, laboriously, beset in blinding fogs, swept with, icy rains, buffeted and mauled and man-handled by the unending assaults of the sea, the Bertha Millner worked her way northward up that iron coast till suddenly she entered an elysium. Overnight she seemed to have run into it: it was a world of green, wooded islands, of smooth channels, of warm and steady winds, of cloudless skies.
Over it and upon it swarmed and clambered thousands of sea-birds, while all around and below the water was thick with gorging sharks. A dreadful, strangling decay fouled all the air. The whale was a sperm-whale, and fully twice the length of the "Bertha Millner." The work of tricing him up occupied the beach-combers throughout the entire day.
Millner was persuaded that every individual woe mitigated by the philanthropy of Orlando G. Spence added just so much to the sum-total of human inefficiency, and it was one of his favourite subjects of speculation to picture the innumerable social evils that may follow upon the rescue of one infant from Mount Taygetus.
Annie flashed a blazing look at him, slammed the gate, and left him alone on the sidewalk. A little later he saw the objectionable man making a bargain with Wing about carrying a note, and with a sore and angry heart he watched the shabby hat and the long queue travel up the hill to the Millner home. While he was at work among his trees that afternoon he saw them ride past.
In the new order upon which he had entered, one principle of the old survived: the point of honour between allies. And Millner had promised Mr. Spence to speak to Draper about his Bible Class. ... Draper, thrown back in his chair, and swinging a loose leg across a meagre knee, listened with his habitual gravity.
It had been good fun, after all, this three weeks' life on the "Bertha Millner," a strange episode cut out from the normal circle of his conventional life.
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