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one another what they would order at their first meal ashore; for
now the land was in plain sight. A Gloucester swordfish-boat
drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit
flourishing his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the
wet. "And all's well!" he sang cheerily, as though he were watch
on a big liner. "Wouverman's waiting fer you, Disko. What's the
news o' the Fleet?"

Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm
pounded overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from
four different quarters at once. It gave the low circle of hills
round Gloucester Harbour, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with
the broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the
water, in blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to
the minute as the "We're Here" crawled in on half-flood, and the
whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her. Then the storm died
out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white flame, followed
by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and the shaken
air tingled under the stars as it got back to silence.

"The flag, the flag!" said Disko, suddenly, pointing upward.

"What is ut?" said Long Jack.

"Otto! Ha'af mast. They can see us frum shore now."

"I'd clean forgot. He's no folk to Gloucester, has he?"

"Girl he was goin' to be married to this fall."

"Mary pity her!" said Long Jack, and lowered the little flag half-
mast for the sake of Otto, swept overboard in a gale off Le Have
three months before.

Disko wiped the wet from his eyes and led the "We're Here" to
Wouverman's wharf, giving his orders in whispers, while she swung
round moored tugs and night-watchmen hailed her from the ends of
inky-black piers. Over and above the darkness and the mystery of
the procession, Harvey could feel the land close round him once
more, with all its thousands of people asleep, and the smell of
earth after rain, and the familiar noise of a switching-engine
coughing to herself in a freight-yard; and all those things made
his heart beat and his throat dry up as he stood by the foresheet.
They heard the anchor-watch snoring on a lighthouse-tug, nosed
into a pocket of darkness where a lantern glimmered on either
side; somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a rope, and they
made fast to a silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds
full of warm emptiness, and lay there without a sound.

Then Harvey sat down by the wheel, and sobbed and sobbed as though
his heart would break, and a tall woman who had been sitting on a
weigh-scale dropped down into the schooner and kissed Dan once on
the cheek; for she was his mother, and she had seen the "We're
Here" by the lightning-flashes. She took no notice of Harvey till
he had recovered himself a little and Disko had told her his
story. Then they went to Disko's house together as the dawn was
breaking; and until the telegraph office was open and he could

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