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experience, moved the "We're Here" from berth to berth, always
with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen
board.

But Disko's board was the Grand Bank - a triangle two hundred and
fifty miles on each side a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with
dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by
the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of
the fishing-fleet.
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For days they worked in fog - Harvey at the bell - till, grown
familiar with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his
heart rather in his mouth. But the fog would not lift, and the
fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six
hours at a time. Harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff
or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to
the schooner guided by the bell and Tom's instinct; Manuel's conch
sounding thin and faint beside them. But it was an unearthly
experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey dreamed of
the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines
that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on
the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later
he was out with Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom
bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran out, and still the
anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for that
his last touch with earth was lost. "Whale-hole," said Manuel,
hauling in. "That is good joke on Disko. Come!" and he rowed to
the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the
skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the
barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank. They made
another berth through the fog, and that time the hair of Harvey's
head stood up when he went out in Manuel's dory. A whiteness moved
in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the
grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting. It was
his first introduction to the dread summer berg of the Banks, and
he cowered in the bottom of the boat while Manuel laughed. There
were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it seemed a sin
to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting
"sun-scalds" with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when
Harvey was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to
another.

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his
hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail
scythed back and forth against the blue sky. That was magnificent,
in spite of Disko saying that it would break a snake's back to
follow his wake. But, as usual, pride ran before a fall. They were
sailing on the wind with the staysail - an old one, luckily - set,
and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he
had mastered the art. The foresail went over with a bang, and the
foregaff stabbed and ripped through the stay-sail, which, was of

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