[2] And they have seen many strange sights, sea-serpents not a few,
and mermaids quite beyond the possibility of mistake, and men who can
call the wind with four knots in a string and words unlearnable, and
others who can alter the course of a waterspout by a secret spell, and a
captain who made a floating beacon of junk soaked in petroleum in a
tar-barrel and set it adrift and stood up on the quarter-deck calling on
all the three hundred and sixty-five saints in the calendar out of the
Neapolitan almanack he held--and got a breeze, too, for his pains, as
Ruggiero adds with a quiet and somewhat incredulous smile when he has
finished the yarn. All these things they have seen with their eyes, and
many more which it is impossible to remember, but all equally
astonishing though equally familiar to everybody who has been at sea ten
years.
[Footnote 2: The writer knows of a Sorrentine captain, commanding a
large bark who, when top-sails are reefed in his watch regularly takes
the lee earing, which, as most landsmen need to be told, is the post of
danger and honour.]
And now in mid-June they are at home again, since Sorrento is their home
now, and they are inclined to take a turn with the pleasure boats by
way of a change and engage themselves for the summer, Ruggiero with a
gentleman from the north of Italy known as the Conte di San Miniato, and
Sebastiano with a widowed Sicilian lady and her daughter, the Marchesa
di Mola and the Signorina Beatrice Granmichele, generally, if
incorrectly, spoken of as Donna Beatrice.
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