"To hell with them that's saved," said he; "Here's to them that died."

Τ'

WAS Patsie Oddie said that-that is, said it first. Many people have repeated it since, but with Patsie Oddie it was born. He said a whole lot more enough for somebody to make a song of-but the two lines quoted above serve to sum the matter up.

It was a winter's morning he said it. Cold? Oh, but it was cold. Wind from the north-west and blowing hard-a sort of dry blizzard. Every vessel coming in had stories to tell of what a time they had to get home and how long it took them.

"It's been tack, tack, tack from St. Peter's Bank, till we fair chafed the jaws off the boom of her," said Crump Taylor. "Four days and four nights from Le Have," said Tom O'Donnell. "Four days and four nights for the able Colleen Bawn to come three hundred miles. Four days and four nights to butt her shoulders homeand glad to get home at that."

That was the story from all of them when they came in. And they were sights coming in, too. Ice? You had to look half-way to the mast-head to see anything but ice. Anchors, bows, dories in the waist, cable on deck-all was solid as could be all on deck from rail to rail and clear aft to the wheel-ice, ice, ice.

The crew of the Delia Corrigan were putting her stores aboard. Her skipper, Patsie Oddie, was standing on the dock and looking her over. He hummed a song as he looked. This was just after he had painted her black. She had come to him black, but in a run of bad luck he had painted her blue; and having worked off the bad luck, he had painted her black again. Now she looked beautiful-black and beautiful-and able! Let no man cast eye on the Delia and not praise her ableness while Patsie Oddie was by.

All at once he called out to one of his men: "Martin, let's take a walk up the street." And Martin went gladly enough. First they had a drink, and then Patsie stepped into the shop of what all fishermen

rated the best tailor in Gloucester. "Measure me for a suit of sails," was his word of greeting there. "Give me a Crump Taylor vest, a Wesley Marrs jacket and a Tom O'Donnell pair of pants, and all of the best. And mind the mains'l."

"The overcoat, Captain ?"

"The overcoat? What else? Isn't she the biggest sail of all? Mind when you come to that-put plenty of duck to it, the best and finest of duck. And good stout duck, double-ought, like what gen'rally goes into a fores'l. And the best and finest of selvin' and trimmin's along the leach and the luff and in the belly of it. And let it hang low-the latest fashion, same's you made Crump Taylor. Crump steps ashore a while ago with one down to the rail. He tells me he has to sway it up every now and then to keep it off the deck, Five weeks to-day I'll want it. Mind now, the best.”

"And which way do you go now, skipper?" said the tailor when he had taken the big skipper's measure.

"To the east'ard," said Patsie.

"But not to-day?" said the tailor. "Too blowy, ain't it?"

Maybe," said Patsie, "you'd like to go skipper o' the Delia Corrigan? S'pose now you go on with that suit and let me go to the east'ard. And you tell me what'll be and I'll pay you now. How much?"

66

Will you go as high as forty-five dollars for the suit and sixty-five for the coat, a hundred and ten dollars in all, captain ?"

"Yes, and a hundred and forty-five and a hundred and sixty-five and three hundred and ten in all, if need be. The best of duck I want, mind, and double-ought in the big coat-no less. It's to be a weddin', maybe."

"Best man?" said the tailor.

"I dunno," said Patsie, "whether it'll be best man or second-best man, but that's the way of it now. Maybe I'll know more about it afore we put out. But if I don't call for it next trip, you c'n wear it yourself. Here's your money. Come along, Martin."

Down the street he stopped at a jeweller's shop. "A diamond ring I want, and I

don't know much about them."

He looked over an envelopful that the salesman emptied on to the glass case. "But I don't want any red or yellow or fancy colors a good white one I want. Now here's one. A hundred dollars? Something better than that. This one now? A hundred and fifty? And this one? A hundred and seventy-five, is it? And here's a two hundred one, you say? But here's a better one, isn't it? It's a bigger one, anyway. Only a hundred and eighty? Like men, aren't they-the biggest not always the best? Like men, yes—and like women, too—the showiest not always the best. I'll take this one, the two hundred and fifty dollar lad. Martin, how do you like that? Would a young woman be pleased with that, d'y' think?"

"The woman, skipper, that wouldn't be pleased with that ought to be hove over the rail."

"Well, I hope we won't have to heave nobody over the rail. But pick out a little something for yourself, Martin-boy. There's something there'd go fine in your necktie when you're ashore. Hush, hush, boy-take it and don't talk. And now"to the man behind the case-"how much all told? This little pin for myself, too." "Two hundred and fifty, and twenty for your friend's pin, and the little thing for yourself, five dollars-I'll throw that in, captain-two hundred and seventy. And if you have a mind to change that diamond any time, we'll be willing to give you something else for it."

Patsie looked down at the floor and then up at the salesman. "I don't think I'll want to change it. I mayn't have any use for it, but whether I do or not you won't see it back here any more. Let's be moving, Martin."

He led the way out and away from Main Street and stopped on a corner. "Martin, do you wait under the lee of this house whilst I jogs on a bit. 'Tisn't long I'll be gone. Swing off when you see me headin' back and wait for me at the bottom of the hill."

Martin waited, but not for long. It seemed to him that he had taken no more than a dozen drags of his pipe when he saw his skipper coming back. Down the hill

went Martin, and after him came his skipper.

Not a word said Patsie Oddie until they were on Main Street again. Then it was only, "The stores'll be aboard by now, don't you think, Martin?"

"They ought to, skipper."

"Then we'll put out." He threw a glance at the sky and then a look to the flag on the Custom House as they turned off Main Street to go down to the dock. the head of the dock they met Wesley Marrs. "Hullo, Patsie," said Wesley.

At

"Hullo, Wesley," said Patsie. "Go on to the vessel you, Martin, and tell them to make sail. I'll follow on." Then, when Martin had gone on ahead, "When'd you get in, Wesley?"

'Just shot in."

"How's it outside?"

"Plenty of the one kind," said Wesley. Anybody that likes it no'-west ought to be pleased. Tack, tack, tack, for every blessed foot of the way. All but put into Shelburne once to give the crew a rest. Night and day, tack, tack, tack—I cal❜late the rudder post's worn most out. Yes, sir. And never a let-up chopping ice—had to, to keep her from sinking under us. Fourteen days from Fortune Bay that I've run in fifty-odd hours in the Lucy with the wind to another quarter. Man, but I was beginning to think the baby'd be grown a man afore I'd see him again. Well, I'm off, Patsie."

"Where to?"

'Where to? Home, of course.' "Oh, home?"

"Of course the baby and the wife. Patsie, but you ought to marry. You'll never be half a man till you marry.”

"Yes? And who'll I marry?" "Oh, some nice, fine girl. Man, but there's whole schools of girls 'd jump to marry you-whole schools, man. Heave your seine and you'd get a deck-load of 'em or a dory-load, anyway."

"No, nor a dory-load, nor a single one caught by the gills in mistake-me that has no more learnin' than a husky out o' Greenland. Not me, Wesley, that can't read my own name unless it's wrote in plain print and that c'n only find my way about by dead reckoning. I c'n haul the log and, knowin' her course and allowin' for tides and one thing or another that's set down and the

"Yes, Patsie, and knows it better than nineteen out o' twenty that has sextants and quadrants and can run them-what do they call 'em? Summer lines?"

o' me.

'Well, maybe as well as some, Wesley. But, Wesley, girls aren't lookin' for the likes Patsie Oddie'll do to handle a vessel, maybe, and he'll take her where any other man that sails the sea'll take her, and he'll bring her home again. And he's good enough to get the fish and bring them to market, to hang out in a blow, to carry sail till all's blue, and the like o' that. But his style don't go these days, Wesley. No, there may be schools o' girls swimming around somewheres, but they're divin' the twine when Patsie Oddie makes a set. Anyway, it wouldn't make any difference to me if whole rafts of 'em was to come swimming alongside and poke their heads up and say, 'Come and take me.' I'm one o' them queer kind, Wesley, that only goes after one girl. And I set for her-and didn't get her."

Wesley said nothing to that for a while. Then it was: "Well, Patsie, never mind. I didn't think when I spoke first. I'll say, though, that I don't think much of the girl that wouldn't stand watch with you if you asked her. If she wanted a man, Patsie, I'm sure I don't know where she'd get a better one-that's if it's a man she wanted. If she don't want a man, but only a smooth kind of arrangement that plays a banjo or c'n stand up to a pianner and sing, 'I loves yer, I loves yer,' or some other damn mess -and the same to every girl that looks his way-one of the kind that's hell ashore, but can't take in sail in a gale without washin' a couple of men over the lee-rail, one of the kind that gives this way and that to every tide that ebbs and flows, like a red-painted whistling buoy-why then maybe somebody else'd look prettier swashing around for the people to look at and make use of. Maybe," went on Wesley, "she'd take a notion to some bucko like Artie Orcutt that just lost the Neptune. Heard of it?"

"Twas in the papers this morning, so they tell me. I'm not much of a hand to read papers, you know."

"Well, he lost his vessel and ten of his men and ought to lose his papers. With half a man's courage and a quarter of the

have, he'd 've saved his vessel and all his men.

He c'n thank the Lucy Foster's ableness and the courage of some of her crew that a soul of them got home at all. They came home with us-all but Orcutt-from Fortune Bay. He was going to get a passage over to St. Pierre and wait a while there."

"My," said Patsie, "that'll be a bad bit o' news to Delia." "What!"

"Yes, Orcutt is the man. I think 'tis him, anyways. I know he used to hang around there when I was to sea-and a word dropped this morningIt must be somebody; and who but him?"

Wesley looked at Patsie. "Well, if it is him, may the Lord forgive me for picking him off. I wish I'd knowed it, though maybe, after all, I couldn't managed it to leave him and take the others. Oh, well, it's all in the year's fishing. He's lucky. Maybe he'll live to teach this girl of hers what a man oughtn't be, though I don't suppose you'll care so much about it by the time she's learned the lesson. Man, but I can't believe Delia Corrigan'd throw you for Artie Orcutt. No, Patsie, I can't. But here's the Anchorage fair on our beam. What d'y' say to a little touch, hah? A pretty cold morning, Patsie."

"I don't mind, Wesley."

"What'll it be to, Patsie. Wesley raised his glass and waited for Patsie. They were leaning against the rail by that time.

"What to? Oh, to the Neptune's gang the whole ten of 'em."

"Sure enough—the whole ten. Here's a shoot-but hold up. Which ten, Patsie— the ten lost or the ten saved?”

Them that died? H-m-and yet I don't know but what you're right. They've got their share, come to think-you've got it right, Patsie. Here's to them that was lost." And Wesley gulped his liquor down. "And which way, Patsie?" Wesley inquired after the return drink.

"To the east'ard," said Patsie.

"To the east'ard, is it? Well, I don't need to say fair wind to you, for you've got it. This wind holds, and you'll be heavin'

trawls in that fav'rite spot of yours on Sable Island no'th-east bar in forty hours or SO. I cal❜late you'll keep on fishing there till some fine day you get caught. Well, good luck and drive her, Patsie, till you're back again." And Wesley swung off for his wife and baby.

"Drive her," Wesley had said, and certainly Patsie Oddie drove her that trip to the east'ard. Before a whistling gale and under four whole lower sails the Delia went away from Eastern Point and across the Bay of Fundy like a ghost in torment. Two or three new men, not yet in full sympathy with their skipper, began to inquire what it all meant. They could see the sense of driving a vessel like that on a passage home, but going out!

On that passage to the east'ard only the watch stayed on deck unless he had business there the watch and the skipperthe skipper walking the quarter and dodging the seas that came after her between little lines of some song he was humming to himself. Every man on coming below after a watch spoke of the skipper and his singing, but only a word did they catch now and then to remember afterward.

"Out in the snow and the gale they rowed, And no man saw them more,

was what one caught.

"And a fine thing that, to be singing on a cold winter's night with a howling gale behind and the seas breaking over her quarter. Yes, a fine thing, that," said the crew, in the security of the cabin below.

And no man saw them more

Some men lost in dories the skipper must have been talking about, and after that: "And should it be the Lord's decree Some day to lay me in the sea,

There'll be no woman to mourn for meFor that, O Lord, here's thanks to Thee!" under his breath generally, but his voice rising now and then with the wind.

Martin Carr, who happened to be at the wheel just then, made out that snatch of his skipper's song as he walked the tumbling quarter. And he kept walking the quarter, walking the quarter-and a cold night it was for a man to be walking the quarter-a word to the watch once in a while, but saying nothing mostly, except to croon the savage songs to himself.

Surely nothing peaceful was coming out of that kind of a song, thought watch after

watch, bracing themselves at the wheel to meet each new blast of the no'-west wind. In the morning he was still there walking the quarter-less mournful, perhaps, but in a savage humor. Men who had sailed with him for years did not know what to make of it. There was the incident of the big bark, a good part of whose sail had evidently been blown away and the most of what was left was tied up. Under the smallest possible canvas she was heading close up to the wind and making small way of it.

Why the divil don't they heave her entirely!" snapped Patsie. "Look at her, will you, the size of her and the sail she's carryin', and then the size of this little one and the sail she's carryin'."

The men chopping ice on the bark's deck stood transfixed as they saw the little Delia sweep by. Under her four lowers, and going like the blizzard itself was she, with a big bearded man, wrapped to his eyes in a great coat, waving his arms and swearing across the white-topped seas at them.

"And did you never see a vessel afore?" barked Patsie. "Well, look your fill, then, and get our name while you're about it, and report us, will you?-the Delia Corrigan, Gloucester, and doin' her fifteen knots. good, will you?”

And then, turning away to his own: "The likes o' some of 'em oughtn't be allowed a cable-length off shore. Their mothers ought to be spoke to about it. There's a fellow there ought to be going along about his business-and look at him, hove to! Waitin' for it to moderate! Lord, think of it-as fine a day as this and waitin' for it to moderate! The sun shinin' and as nice a green sea as ever a man'd want to look at! It's the like o' them that loses vessels and men-makes widows and orphans."

So much for his crew. Then a dark look ahead and beyond the green and white seas that were sweeping by the Delia's bow, while the bearded lips moved wrathfully. "Ten men lost, blast him! And drinkin' wine, maybe, in Saint Peer now if we c'd only see him! Yes, and he'll come back to Gloucester with a divil of a fine story to tell. 'Tis a hero he'll make himself out to be. Looked in the face o' death and escaped, he'll say-blast him!"

Sable Island, sometimes, and not too extravagantly, termed the Graveyard of the

Atlantic, is set among shoal waters that afford the best of feeding ground for the particular kinds of fish that Gloucestermen most desire-halibut, cod, haddock, and what not-and so to its shoal waters do the fishermen come to trawl or hand-line. Lying about east and west, a flat quarter moon in shape, is Sable Island. Two long bars, extending north-westerly and northeasterly, make of it a full deep crescent. Nowhere is the fishing so good (or so dangerous) as close in on these bars, and the closer in and the shoaler the water, the better the fishing. There are a few men alive in Gloucester who have been in close enough to see the surf break on the bare bar; but that was in soft weather and the bar to wind'ard, and they invariably got out in a hurry.

Two hundred and odd wrecks of one kind or another, steam and sail, have settled in the sands of Sable Island. Of this there is clear and indisputable record. Of how many good vessels have been driven ashore on the long bars on dark and stormy nights or in the whirls of snowstorms and swallowed up in the fine sand before ever mortal eye could make note of their disappearing hulls there is no telling.

A Gloucester fisherman needs no tabulated statement to remind him that the bones of hundreds of his kind are bleaching on the sands of Sable Island, and yet of all the men who sail the sea they are the only class that do not give it wide berth in winter. And of all the skippers who resorted to the north-east bar in winter Patsie Oddie was pre-eminent. Some there were who said he was reckless, but those that knew him best answered that 'twould be recklessness indeed if he didn't know the place; if he didn't know every knoll and gully of it that man could know, including gullies and knolls that weren't down on charts-and never would be, because the men that made the charts would never go in where Patsie Oddie had gone and sounded when the weather allowed.

It was on the Sable Island grounds-the north-east bar-that the Delia, after a slashing passage, let go her anchor on the morning of the second day. Twenty fathoms of water it was, shoal enough water any time, but good and shoal for that time of the year, when gales that made lee shore of the bar were frequent. The Delia's crew

weren't worrying though-they gloried in their skipper.

Laying there close in, with the wind north-west, the Delia was in the lee of the north-east bar, and that first day, too, was not at all rough. And the fish were thick there, and as fine and fat as man would want to see. Fifteen thousand of halibut and ten thousand of good cod-certainly that was a great day's work. Wasn't it worth fishing close in to get a haul like that? Turning in that night they were all thinking what a fine day they had made of it, and wondering if the fellow they had seen to the east'ard-in deeper and safer water-had done so well. But they all felt sure he hadn't. "In the morning," said Martin Carr, "he'll get up his courage and come in and give us a look-over, and finding we did so well, maybe he'll anchor close in and make a set, too.”

Nobody saw him in the morning, however, for it came on thick o' snow and the wind to the east'ard. Wind in that quarter would be bad, of course, if it breezed up; but it hadn't yet breezed up, and the Delia's crew weren't minding any mere possibility. It wasn't too bad to put the dories over, and between squalls they hauled again, heaving up the anchor, however, before leaving the vessel, so that their skipper could stand down and pick them up flying.

"We'll clear out, I'm thinkin', for tonight," said Patsie when they were all hauled. And clear out they did, which was well, too, for that night the wind increased to a bad gale, and, safe and snug below, alongside the hot stove or under the bright lamp, it did them all good to think that the no'th-east bar was not under their lee.

Even when they were jogging that night it looked bad; but they knew they might do it and live. They had to keep an eye out, of course, and stand ready to stand off in a hurry, for should it come too bad it would mean lively work to get out.

Safe away to the east'ard of them, when they had done dressing down that night, they could make out the riding light of the other vessel to anchor.

"In the mornin', whoever he is, he'll be gettin' his courage up, and maybe he'll drop down," said the Delia's crew.

They were in great good-humor. And well they might be, with twenty-five thou