Heard and Seen on Deck
the Norman D. "She was a sweet schooner, folks," he said; "she would do anything but talk, and she tried hard enough to do that."
For the matter of that, I have said little enough about the Norman D. herself. She is a 390-ton schooner. The captain said she used to be 425, but she was cut down, because on a schooner of more than 400 tons, there has to be a certified mate—a mate who has passed examinations and has a license or something of the kind to indicate that he is a competent officer. Nowadays there is so little sailing, and the terms of enlistment are so short, and the men are so unsteady, sailing a few months and then going off ashore somewhere, that they don't get enough training to become certified mates. Therefore mates are very hard to get. So the schooner was cut down. (An ordinary man would have told all that in about three minutes and three quarters, but not so the captain. He told it inside and out, backwards and forwards, two or three times, and we never heard the last of that certified mate.) She has masts of about ninety feet; very fine trees they were once. Her booms are huge, especially the spanker, which is almost as large around as the part of the mast just below the crosstrees. Her jibboom is very long and straight, for she carries an outer jib—jib, flying jib, and outer jib. She is all painted white, with a narrow stripe of red about three feet below the bulwarks,
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