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"

Half a dozen voices together, in a most tuneful chorus, as her
stern went down with a roll and a bubble into the troughs: "Thay-
aah - she -strikes!"

"Hard up! Hard up fer your life! You're on top of her now."

"Daown! Hard daown! Let go everything!"

"All hands to the pumps!"

"Daown jib an' pole her!"

Here the skipper lost his temper and said things. Instantly
fishing was suspended to answer him, and he heard many curious
facts about his boat and her next port of call. They asked him if
he were insured; and whence he had stolen his anchor, because,
they said, it belonged to the Carrie Pitman; they called his boat
a mud-scow, and accused him of dumping garbage to frighten the
fish; they offered to tow him and charge it to his wife; and one
audacious youth slipped almost under the counter, smacked it with
his open palm, and yelled: "Gid up, Buck!"

The cook emptied a pan of ashes on him, and he replied with cod-
heads. The bark's crew fired small coal from the galley, and the
dories threatened to come aboard and "razee" her. They would have
warned her at once had she been in real peril; but, seeing her
well clear of the Virgin, they made the most of their chances. The
fun was spoilt when the rock spoke again, a half-mile to windward,
and the tormented bark set everything that would draw and went her
ways; but the dories felt that the honours lay with them.

All that night the Virgin roared hoarsely and next morning, over
an angry, white-headed sea, Harvey saw the Fleet with flickering
masts waiting for a lead. Not a dory was hove out till ten
o'clock, when the two Jeraulds of the Day's Eye, imagining a lull
which did not exist, set the example. In a minute half the boats
were out and bobbing in the cockly swells, but Troop kept the
"We're Heres" at work dressing-down. He saw no sense in "dares";
and as the storm grew that evening they had the pleasure of
receiving wet strangers only too glad to make any refuge in the
gale. The boys stood by the dory-tackles with lanterns, the men
ready to haul, one eye cocked for the sweeping wave that would
make them drop everything and hold on for the dear life. Out of
the dark would come a yell of "Dory, dory!" They would hook up and
haul in a drenched man and a half-sunk boat, till their decks were
littered down with nests of dories and the bunks were full. Five
times in their watch did Harvey, with Dan, jump at the foregaff
where it lay lashed on the boom, and cling with arms, legs, and
teeth to rope and spar and sodden canvas as a big wave filled the
decks. One dory was smashed to pieces, and the sea pitched the man
head first on to the decks, cutting his forehead open; and about
dawn, when the racing seas glimmered white all along their cold
edges, another man, blue and ghastly, crawled in with a broken
hand, asking news of his brother. Seven extra mouths sat down to
breakfast: a Swede; a Chatham skipper; a boy from Hancock, Maine;

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