Chapter VIII: The Rolling Ocean

Bunny and Sue were excited when they heard what their mother said about the ship, and they, too, thought it ought not to be allowed to start so soon. Mr. Brown looked at the steward and the man smiled.

“The ship isn’t going yet—not for several hours,” the steward said. “You will have plenty of time to get your luggage on board.”

“It feels as if it were going,” remarked Bunny.

“It’s—now—jiggily like,” Sue said.

“They’re trying the engines,” explained the steward. “The ship is still fast in the dock, but the engineer wants to make sure everything is all right, so he has started the machinery.”

“Oh,” said Bunny Brown.

“Oh,” said sister Sue.

Then Bunny looked across the stateroom toward a round opening in the side and said:

“We aren’t moving. I can tell by looking out of the window.”

“Yes, that’s a good way to make sure—look from a porthole,” said the steward.

“What’s a porthole?” asked Sue.

“That, which Bunny called a window,” explained her father. “On a ship many things have different names from those on shore, though they may be the same.”

“Well, if we aren’t going off without our trunks it will be all right,” said Mrs. Brown, with a smile. “Now that we are here we might as well settle a little, I suppose. Are we going ashore again?” she asked her husband.

“I think not,” he answered. “How soon do we start?” he inquired from the steward.

“In about three hours, I think.”

“Then we won’t go ashore,” decided Mrs. Brown. “I’ll put some more suitable clothes on Bunny and Sue so they can romp around, as I know they want to.”

“I’m going down to see the engines!” cried Bunny, as his mother opened a valise that contained his clothes.

“And I’m going to take my doll up and show her the fishes,” added Sue.

“Better wait a while,” said her father, with a laugh. “I don’t believe there are any fishes in this part of the Delaware River, so close to Philadelphia. As for you going to the engine room, Bunny, you must wait until I can go with you.”

“All right,” agreed the little boy and girl. There was plenty to see and do in other places on the _Beacon_, they thought.

Going up on deck after they had donned clothes more suitable for play than those they had worn on the journey, Bunny and Sue saw many busy scenes. Men were loading boxes and barrels into the holds of the ship. Other men were coming on board, hurrying off, and then coming back on again. Captain Ward was upon the bridge, as it is called, a high, narrow place near the front, or bow, of the ship, from which the vessel is steered.

There was so much going on that the time passed very quickly for Bunny and Sue, and in what seemed about half an hour since they had come on board they heard shouts of:

“All ashore that’s going ashore!”

“What does he mean?” asked Bunny of his father, pointing to a sailor who was thus calling.

“He means the ship is going to start soon,” explained Mr. Brown, “and that those who aren’t sailing on her will have to go on shore or they will be carried away.”

“Then, in a little while, we’ll be on the rolling ocean—the rolling ocean!” cried Bunny, and he walked about the deck with that funny, heaving motion of his shoulders. “That’s how it will be when we get on the rolling ocean,” he explained to his sister.

“Shall I have to walk like that?” she asked.

“Yes,” answered Bunny.

“Shall I, Daddy?” Sue appealed to her father.

“Of course not!” he answered, with a laugh. “Though, of course, when we get out where the waves are big the ship will not be as calm and steady as she is now at her dock.”

However, neither Bunny nor Sue thought long about this, for there was so much else to take up their attention. They watched and saw the big hawsers, or ropes that moored the ship to the pier, cast off. Then the _Beacon_ trembled and shook again as her big engines began to work, and, slowly at first, but growing faster and faster as she gathered speed, the vessel glided away from the wharf.

“Hurray! Now we’re going!” cried Bunny Brown.

“Now we’re going!” echoed his sister Sue.

Steaming down the Delaware River, with Philadelphia on one side and the New Jersey city of Camden on the other side, is not very exciting. True, there was plenty to look at, from the big buildings of Philadelphia on one hand to the many river boats on the other. So Bunny and Sue kept their eyes busy.

Mr. Brown found some members of the fish company, with whom he talked. Mrs. Brown met some of these men’s wives. One of the ladies had been in the West Indies before, and she told Mrs. Brown of the sights to be seen there.

Bunny and Sue, left to themselves, wandered here and there about the deck. Bunny grew a little impatient, for the ship, moving down the river, was as steady as a ferryboat and did not roll as he thought it ought.

In and out among other craft on the river the _Beacon_ threaded her course, now and then blowing her big whistle to warn other boats which way she was going to steer.

“Do you like it here, Sue?” asked Bunny.

“Lots! Don’t you?” replied the little girl.

“Yes. But when we get down on the big ocean the boat will roll more and I’m going to catch some fish.”

“How are you going to catch any fish? You haven’t any pole.”

“You don’t have to use a pole,” explained Bunny. “You just drop your line over the edge of the boat, like this.”

From his pocket he pulled a ball of cord which he unwound. Then from the edge of his blouse he took a pin, which he bent up until it looked like a fishhook. Bunny tied the string to the head of the pin, and then he fastened to the string near the pin a button which he pulled off his knickerbockers.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have pulled off that button!” gasped Sue. “Mother won’t like it!”

“It was almost off, anyhow,” explained Bunny. “It was just hanging by a thread, and it has to be sewed on, anyhow. I’ll give it to mother and let her fix it on again. I had to have something for a weight on my fishline.”

“You can’t catch any fish on a bent-pin hook,” declared Sue. “I tried it in the brook at home, and I never caught any fish—’cept maybe a little, teeny one.”

“I’m not going really to fish with this bent pin,” Bunny said. “I’m just showing you how I’m going to do it when we get on the rolling ocean. Daddy will give me a real hook when we get there. He didn’t want me to keep one in my pocket, for it might stick into me.”

“Fishhooks are terribly sticky,” agreed Sue. “I don’t like ’em much.”

“I do,” declared her brother.

“I guess fish don’t like ’em, either,” went on Sue.

“Fish have to be caught,” said Bunny. “I guess the hook doesn’t hurt ’em very much. But this is how I’m going to fish.”

_Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on the Rolling Ocean._ _Page 78_
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He dropped his bent-pin hook and button-weighted line over the rail of the ship from the upper deck, on which he and Sue had been looking at the shores of the river on either side. The string unwound from the ball in Bunny’s hand.

Suddenly a queer look came over the little boy’s face. The string tightened in his hand and when he tried gently to pull the hook and button up the cord did not move.

“What’s the matter?” asked Sue.

“I—I guess I got a bite!” cried Bunny. “I didn’t think I could catch a fish here with a bent pin, and I didn’t put any bait on, but I guess I caught something!”

“Pull up!” cried Sue.

“I will,” said Bunny, and he did.

But no sooner had he begun to haul in on his line than a man’s voice shouted from the deck below him:

“Hi there! What you doing? Who’s playing tricks?”

Sue leaned over the rail and looked down.

“Oh, Bunny Brown,” she cried, with a laugh, “you’ve caught a man’s hat!”

“What?” shouted Bunny.

“You caught a man’s hat!” repeated his sister.

Bunny ceased to pull in on his cord and also leaned over the rail. Caught on his pin was a sailor’s white hat with its turned-up brim. And reaching up, trying to get back his hat which was being lifted away from him, was a sailor.

“Oh! Oh!” gasped Bunny when he saw what had happened. “I—I didn’t mean to do that.”

“All right! I’ll excuse you!” laughed the sailor. “Lower away now, my lad!”

Bunny did not know exactly what this meant, but he guessed the sailor wanted him to let the cord unwind again so the hat would go down, and this Bunny did. Looking over the rail, he and Sue saw the sailor unhook his hat from the bent pin, put the hat on his head, and then, still laughing, go about his work.

The dangling hooked pin, weighted by the button, had caught under the brim of the sailor’s hat as he leaned over near the rail on the deck below, and Bunny had really made a catch, though it was not a fish.

“You’d better not try to catch anything more,” advised Sue.

“I guess I hadn’t,” agreed Bunny, as he took the pin off the string, wound the latter back into a ball and put it in his pocket. He also put the button in his pocket, intending to ask his mother to sew it on later. The bent pin he threw away.

Bunny and Sue continued to play about the deck while the _Beacon_ steamed her way down the Delaware River, toward Delaware Bay, whence she would get into the Atlantic Ocean. After a while the children decided to play hide-and-seek, and Bunny said he would hide first.

Sue covered her eyes and began to count so as to give her brother a chance to find a good hiding place. And at last, having waited as long as she thought was proper, Sue called:

“Ready or not, I’m coming.”

Opening her eyes, she began to search for Bunny. There were many places where he might hide, new and strange places on the deck of the steamer.

Sue looked in many of these without finding Bunny. She was going to “give up” when, as she was standing near a big coil of rope, she heard what sounded like a sneeze half held back.

“Oh!” cried Sue. Standing on her tiptoes she looked over and down into the coil of rope, which was hollow and shaped like a small barrel. There, crouched down inside the coil of rope, was Bunny!

“Tit-tat, Bunny!” cried Sue, running to touch “home,” which was a deck ventilator.

“Ho! you wouldn’t have found me if I hadn’t sneezed,” said Bunny as he climbed out of the pile of rope.

“No, I guess I wouldn’t,” agreed Sue. “It was a good place to hide. Now it’s my turn.”

When Bunny “blinded” Sue crept softly away and then, circling back, she hid behind the very ventilator where Bunny was standing. The ventilator was like a big pipe, and it completely hid little Sue. So when Bunny walked away, thinking his sister was perhaps hiding in the same coil of rope where he had been, Sue darted out, touched “home,” and cried:

“In free! In free!”

She had beaten Bunny at his own game.

The children played hide-and-seek until it was time for lunch, and after lunch they had more fun. Then their mother, knowing they must be tired, having arisen early to start traveling, said:

“I think you had better go to your bunks and lie down for a nap, you two.”

“Oh, I don’t want to go to bed in the daytime!” objected Bunny.

“I don’t either, but maybe my doll does,” said Sue.

“Well, Sue, you lie down with your doll,” suggested Mrs. Brown. And when Sue had done this she soon fell asleep. A little later Bunny, having no one with whom to play, went to the stateroom he shared with his father, and soon he was asleep.

When Bunny and Sue awakened some hours later they noticed a peculiar motion to the ship. No longer did she sail along calmly and steadily, but swayed up and down, rolling from side to side.

“Where are we? What’s happened?” Bunny asked his father, who was in the stateroom.

“Come up on deck and see,” was the answer.

It was getting dark when Bunny and his father reached the deck, but it was light enough to see that they were no longer in the river. They were out on big, wide, open water.

“Is this the ocean?” cried Bunny.

“Yes, this is the rolling ocean,” his father said.

Just then the ship gave such a roll that Bunny would have fallen had not his father caught hold of him.