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from beneath the mattress. “My share and no more,” he repeated, and reached across to the shelf in his bunk and drew forth a plug of tobacco. He cut off the proper quantity and rolled it around between his palms the proper length of time before he spoke again. With the pipe between his teeth he had to speak more slowly. “Any man that’s been thirty years trawling will nat’rally have a few things happen to him. To-day makes the third time I’ve been on the bottom of a dory—and cold weather each time—just my blessed luck—cold weather each time”—three times he blew through the stem of his pipe—“and I don’t want to be there the fourth. Eddie-boy, hand me a wisp out of the broom at your elbow.”

While Martin was cleaning out his pipe somebody put the question generally. Would they rather be on the bottom of a dory out to sea or on a vessel piled up on the rocky shore somewhere?

“On the rocks for me.”

“And for me.”

“Yes, a chance to get ashore from a wreck, but the bottom of a dory with the sea breaking over you, and it cold maybe—cert’nly it’s never any too warm—wr-r-h!”

There seemed to be no doubt of what they would take for their choice. “And yet,” commented Martin when the last word had been said, “I dunno but the closest call ever I had was when the Oliver Cromwell went ashore and was lost off Whitehead.”

“Cripes, but I’m glad I warn’t on her. A bad business that—a bad business. Hand me that plate, will you, Martin”—this from the cook.

“Sure, boy—here y’are—an armful of plates. Cook on a fisherman’s the last job I’d want—you’re never done. And you’re right it was a bad business, cook. When you’ve seen nineteen men washed over one after the other, every man—every man but one, that is—putting up the divil’s own fight for his life before he went—I dunno but what it must be worse than going down at sea altogether, all hands in one second—with no chance at all—though that must be hard enough, too.”

Silence for a while, and then Martin continued: “If I had it to do over again”—two long puffs—“to do over and be lost instead of saved, I don’t know but what I’d rather founder at sea myself. Nineteen men lost—eighteen good men—Lord, but ’twas cruel!”

Martin, with his head back, was gazing thoughtfully up at the deck-beams. A gentle leading question, and he resumed.

“We left Gloucester that trip with the skipper’s—— But to tell that story right a man ought to begin away back. But will you give me a match, somebody?”

He lit up again and then settled himself snugly between the edge of the table and his bunk-board, after the manner of a man who is in for a long sitting-out. Once he really started there were but few interruptions. The loss of the Cromwell was a serious affair, and nobody broke in thoughtlessly; and only when Martin would stop to refill his pipe, or to light up again when he found he had let it go out, did he make any halt himself.

“What the Hoodleys of Cape Ann were, and are still,” began Martin, “of course all of you, or most all of you anyway, know. Or maybe some of you don’t know. Well, they were a hard crowd—but didn’t know it—the kind of people that whenever they got to talking about their own kind, never had any tales to prove maybe that there was even the lightest bit of wit or grace or beauty among them; no, none of that for the Hoodleys of Cape Ann. But to show you what thrifty, hard-headed fore-people they had, they could spin off, any of ’em, a hundred little yarns most any day, as if anybody on earth that knew those of them that were alive would ever doubt what the dead and gone ones must have been. Hard they were—even neighbors that didn’t take life as a dream of poetry said that much of them. Hard they were—man, yes—the kind that little children never toddled up to and climbed on to their knees, nor a man in hard luck by any mistake ever asked the loan of a dollar of—the kind that never a man walked across the street to shake hands with. That’s the kind they were. Take ’em all in all, I guess that the Hoodleys were about as hard a tribe as you’d find in all Essex County—surely ’tisn’t possible there were any harder. And yet you couldn’t pick a flaw in ’em before the law. They were honest. Everybody had to say that for them—paying their debts, their just debts—as they put it them-