encounters the first of the weather-steeped shacks, which increase in number as they improve in appearance until, by the deeper part of the harbour, Salthaven comprises a fair number of cottages, clambering up the gently-sloping hill to the more pretentious homes at the top, perhaps eighty feet above the roadstead.
In the narrow streets at the foot of the hill, a few ancient buildings, ship-chandleries, storehouses, and sail-lofts, clus ter around the wharves, huddling together like old cronies in the sun. But the thick forest of masts has been felled, leaving only the humbler second growth,—the naked topmasts and less intricate cordage of schooners, plying between the port and the Banks or engaged in the coastwise lumber trade.
Still, though a little out at elbow here, the town is not at all forlorn. Many of its respected citizens are retired skippers and shipowners, rich in health and salty vernacular, with pensions and incomes sufficient for all necessities and even those luxuries which the good folk of the place deem Christian. But the younger men—that is the more ambitious of them—one by one are drifting away, some to ships that clear from larger ports, others, detouring from the straight line of their inheritance, to Boston or Providence, becoming mere genuflecting shoe-clerks, or automobile-mechanics forever lying prone under graceless iron hulks instead of walking good decks manwise, with their hands on the tiller and their eyes on the stars.
At about four bells, or two o'clock of June sixth, a group of ancient fishermen, gnarled like apple-trees, had
