Will, lacking the nerve to follow him out onto the yard, clung to the web of ratlines and tarred shrouds at the mast, and called out the next lines.

“ ‘For always roaming with hungry heart / Much have I seen and known—cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments …’ ”

Then Nathaniel, feeling his own nerve slip a little as he looked straight down to the deck one hundred and fifty feet below, marveling at the courage of the sailors who scampered out here, surefooted as squirrels, to shorten sail, not when the ship sat stable as a building but rolled in seas that pitched the spars’ ends toward the wavetops.…

“ ‘… Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move / How dull it is to pause, to make an end / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’ ”

“Natters—back to terra firma?”

“No! Incognita! Think what it would be like to sail a ship like this, all around the world.”

The lofty view of Camden, reduced to the dimensions of a scale-model town, of the quay upon whose stones and bricks lilliputian stevedores scurried amid wagons, handcarts, barrels, casks, and crates cluttered like toys in a messy playroom, of the bay and the islands and the sea beyond, beguiled him. His horizons were the horizons of the osprey or the tern; he saw sails the earthbound could not, the leaning black columns of a steamer miles out.

“I could stay up here all day,” he shouted, then, pointing at the town: “ ‘There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail.…’ ” Like a wind-vane, his finger swung eastward. “ ‘There gloom the dark, broad seas …’ ”

“And there”—Will, pointing below—“lies the deck, where I’m headed. Think I’m afraid of heights. Join me before you slip and turn yourself into a splat of birdshit.”

Nathaniel sidled along the footrope, reached out to snatch a shroud, and, swinging onto the ratlines, followed Will down to the maintop. Will found the platform, a mere forty or fifty feet up, a less vertiginous perch, and paused there for a smoke.

“You’re really addicted to those things,” Nathaniel said.

“You must have at least one vice, if for no other reason than to provide a background against which your virtues shine all the brighter.”

They sat against the mast, Will puffing on the Duke’s until there was barely enough left to hold between his yellowed fingers. He snubbed it out and, figuring the chief mate would give him fifty lashes for tossing the butt on deck, put it in his shirt pocket.

“Don’t much fancy going back to Boston,” he said. “Every day with my nose buried in the Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?”

“What would your old man do if you stayed here?”