There
are few like him left, for the art of sailing is nearly a lost art,
and the difficulty of getting men who can handle square sails is
extraordinary. But this one, the last of an old line, came up, crying
out quite cheerfully, "Sir Owen, we're in luck indeed to have caught
the trades so soon."
"Day after day, night after night, we flew like a seagull. 'Record
sailing,' my skipper often cried to me, telling me the number of
knots we had made in the last four-and-twenty hours."
"And the albatrosses, I hope you didn't catch one?"
"One day the skipper suggested that we should, the breast feathers
being very beautiful; and, the wind having slackened a little, a hook
was baited with a piece of salt pork, which the hungry bird seized.
As soon as he was drawn on board he flapped about more helpless than
anything I have ever seen, falling into everything he could fall
into, biting several of the crew. You know the sonnet in which
Baudelaire compares the bird on the wing to the poet with the Muse
beside him, and the albatross on deck to the poet in the
drawing-room. You remember the sonnet, how the sailors teased the bird
with their short black pipes."
"But the breast feathers?"
"We didn't kill the bird; I wouldn't allow him to be killed.
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