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the cabin floor, where cook and cabin-boy lay like dead men in their bunks, and to lie down in our own bunks, with our clothes on ready for a call, and to listen to the bilge-water spouting knee-high on the galley floor.
    In the Bohemian Club of San Francisco there are some crack sailors. I know, because I heard them pass judgment on the Snark during the process of her building. They found only one vital thing the matter with her, and on this they were all agreed, namely, that she could not run. She was all right in every particular, they said, except that I’d never be able to run her before it in a stiff wind and sea. “Her lines,” they explained enigmatically, “it is the fault of her lines. She simply cannot be made to run, that is all.” Well, I wish I’d only had those crack sailors of the Bohemian Club on board the Snark the other night for them to see for themselves their one, vital, unanimous judgment absolutely reversed. Run? It is the one thing the Snark does to perfection. Run? She ran with a sea-anchor fast for’ard and a full mizzen flattened down aft. Run? At the present moment, as I write this, we are bowling along before it, at a six-knot clip, in the northeast trades. Quite a tidy bit of sea is running. There is nobody at the wheel, the wheel is not even lashed and is set over a half-spoke weather helm. To be precise, the wind is northeast; the Snark’s mizzen is furled, her mainsail is over to starboard, her head-sheets are hauled flat; and the Snark’s course is south-southwest. And yet there are men who have sailed the seas for forty years and who hold that no boat can run before it without being steered. They’ll call me a liar when they read this; it’s what they called Captain Slocum when he said the same of his Spray .
    As regards the future of the Snark I’m all at sea. I don’t know. If I had the money or the credit, I’d build another Snark that would heave to. But I am at the end of my resources. I’ve got to put up with the present Snark or quit—and I can’t quit. So I guess I’ll have to try to get along with heaving the Snark to stern-first. I am waiting for the next gale to see how it will work. I think it can be done. It all depends on how her stern takes the seas. And who knows but that some wild morning on the China Sea, some gray-beard skipper will stare, rub his incredulous eyes and stare again, at the spectacle of a weird, small craft, very much like the Snark , hove to stern-first and riding out the gale?
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    P.S. On my return to California after the voyage, I learned that the Snark was forty-three feet on the water-line instead of forty-five. This was due to the fact that the builder was not on speaking terms with the tape-line or two-foot rule.

CHAPTER III
    ADVENTURE
    No, adventure is not dead, and in spite of the steam engine and of Thomas Cook & Son. When the announcement of the contemplated voyage of the Snark was made, young men of “roving disposition” proved to be legion, and young women as well—to say nothing of the elderly men and women who volunteered for the voyage. Why, among my personal friends there were at least half a dozen who regretted their recent or imminent marriages; and there was one marriage I know of that almost failed to come off because of the Snark .
    Every mail to me was burdened with the letters of applicants who were suffocating in the “man-stifled towns,” and it soon dawned upon me that a twentieth century Ulysses required a corps of stenographers to clear his correspondence before setting sail. No, adventure is certainly not dead—not while one receives letters that begin: “There is no doubt that when you read this soul-plea from a female stranger in New York City,” etc.; and wherein one learns, a little farther on, that this female stranger weighs only ninety pounds, wants to be cabin-boy, and “yearns to see the countries of the