beings. Even as a human life is more secure after it has safely passed the period of infantile ailments, so, too, the vessel that has knocked about for years is to be relied on if she still shows no symptoms of decay. Her original constitution must have been sound; her timbers must have been properly seasoned before she was put together; she could not have been scamped and have been built of sappy rubbish. When sappy timber has been employed, dry-rot invariably breaks out within a few years.
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Off Venice.
A good stout old vessel, for example, was my yawl, the Alerte, of fifty-six tons, yacht measurement. She was nearly thirty years old when I crossed the North and South Atlantic in her, and lay hove-to for months in the often stormy sea off the desert island of Trinidada, while my companions were on shore searching for the hidden treasure
