The little dory was specklessly clean.  In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding.  A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey’s right hand, beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick.  A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale.

“Where’s the sail and mast?” said Harvey, for his hands were beginning to blister.

Dan chuckled.  “Ye don’t sail fishin’-dories much.  Ye pull; but ye needn’t pull so hard.  Don’t you wish you owned her?”

“Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked ’em,” Harvey replied.  He had been too busy to think much of his family till then.

“That’s so.  I forgot your dad’s a millionaire.  You don’t act millionary any, naow.  But a dory an’ craft an’ gear”—­Dan spoke as though she were a whaleboat —­“costs a heap.  Think your dad ’u’d give you one fer—­fer a pet like?”

“Shouldn’t wonder.  It would be ’most the ouly thing I haven’t stuck him for yet.”

“Must be an expensive kinder kid to home.  Don’t slitheroo thet way, Harve.  Short’s the trick, because no sea’s ever dead still, an’ the swells ’ll—­”

Crack!  The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him backwards.

“That was what I was goin’ to say.  I hed to learn too, but I wasn’t more than eight years old when I got my schoolin’.”

Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown.

“No good gettin’ mad at things, Dad says.  It’s our own fault ef we can’t handle ’em, he says.  Le’s try here.  Manuel ’ll give us the water.”

The “Portugee” was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an oar he waved his left arm three times.

“Thirty fathom,” said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook.  “Over with the doughboys.  Bait same’s I do, Harvey, an’ don’t snarl your reel.”

Dan’s line was out long before Harvey had mastered the mystery of baiting and heaving out the leads.  The dory drifted along easily.  It was not worth while to anchor till they were sure of good ground.

“Here we come!” Dan shouted, and a shower of spray rattled on Harvey’s shoulders as a big cod flapped and kicked alongside.  “Muckie, Harvey, muckle!  Under your hand!  Onick!”

Evidently “muckle” could not be the dinner-horn, so Harvey passed over the maul, and Dan scientifically stunned the fish before he pulled it inboard, and wrenched out the hook with the short wooden stick he called a “gob-stick.”  Then Harvey felt a tug, and pulled up zealously.

“Why, these are strawberries!” he shouted.  “Look!”

The hook had fouled among a bunch of strawberries, red on one side and white on the other—­perfect reproductions of the land fruit, except that there were no leaves, and the stem was all pipy and slimy.