TIP, OF THE "SANS SOUCI"
Wanderer. In seaworthiness, however, she appeared to have the better of that boat. She burned gasoline—or petrol, as they called it in those waters—and storage tanks were scattered all over her, above deck and below. The officers lived in Spartan simplicity, commander and junior sharing a tiny stateroom abaft the engine and eating forward in the galley.
"We have our chunk first, you know," explained Tip. "But it's very seldom we sit down to it, for when this little lady gets into a sea you simply can't keep anything on the table."
Nelson secretly thought that careening about the channel in the Sans Souci might be exciting enough, but he was sort of thankful he didn't have to do it. Sailing the waters of Nantucket Sound in the old Wanderer had been fairly safe work, but tossing about a hundred miles from land in this shallop was another thing entirely! He admired Tip's pluck but didn't envy him.
The Sans Souci had been black at one time, and then the vogue of decorating ship's hulls with lines and ripples and spots had come in, and the little craft was a strange and fearsome thing above the water line. Tip was very proud of the camouflaging, though. He had even taken a hand at it himself, borrowing a brush from the painter and
231
