was wanting. He understood the topping lifts that supported the main boom, the foresail, the use of the standing rigging. Kearney, through his work, was talking to him and just as Kearney had explained this and that to Dick, so Dick was explaining it to Aioma. Truly a man can speak though dead, even as Kearney was speaking now.
The method of reefing a sail was unknown to Aioma; a canoe sail was never reefed, reduction of canvas was made by tying the head of the sail up to spill the wind. Fore canvas was unknown to Aioma, but he understood.
The subconscious mathematician in him that made him able to build great canoes capable of standing heavy weather and carrying forty or fifty men apiece, understood all about the practice of the business, though he had never heard of centres of rotation, absolute or relative velocities, of impelling powers, or the laws of the collision of bodies; of inertia or pressures of resistance or squares of velocity or series of inclinations.
Squatting on his hams before the little model of the Rarotanga, he knew nothing of these things and yet he knew that the schooner was good, that she would sail close to the wind with little leeway when the wind was on the beam, that the rudder was better than the steering paddle, that the sail area though great would not capsize her, that she was miles ahead of anything he had ever made in the form of a ship. That the maker of the ayat was a genius beside whom he was
