its way down the pipe; and the general smell and smother were past all description.
Harvey considered affairs, wondered that he was not deathly sick, and crawled into his bunk again, as the softest and safest place, while Dan struck up, “I don’t want to play in your yard,” as accurately as the wild jerks allowed.
“How long is this for?” Harvey asked of Manuel.
“Till she get a little quiet, and we can row to trawl. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps two days more. You do not like? Eh, wha‑at?”
“I should have been crazy sick a week ago, but it doesn’t seem to upset me now—much.”
“That is because we make you fisherman, these days. If I was you, when I come to Gloucester I would give two, three big candles for my good luck.”
“Give who?”
“To be sure—the Virgin of our Church on the Hill. She is very good to fishermen all the time. That is why so few of us Portugee men ever are drowned.”
“You’re a Roman Catholic, then?”
“I am a Madeira man. I am not a Porto Pico boy. Shall I be Baptist, then? Eh, wha‑at? I always give candles—two, three more when I come to Gloucester. The good Virgin she never forgets me, Manuel.”
“I don’t sense it that way,” Tom Platt put in from his bunk, his scarred face lit up by the glare of a match as he sucked at his pipe. “It stands to reason the sea’s the sea; and you’ll get jest about what’s goin’, candles or kerosene, fer that matter.”