BLUE PETER
I
"Yes, it's been swum," puffed the boatman, tugging till the ashen thole-pins creaked. "On'y onct, though, an'—the feller was a buster—that done it—back in '56."
He spat over the gunwale, so that a brown stain of tobacco swept astern on the heaving slant of the green wave. Archer, on the stern thwart, turned his head and looked back over the dazzling water at the mainland, a dark bank of rocks and low hills, with a few roofs and a spire against the late afternoon sun.
"He must have been," he answered. The distance to the American shore was not three miles, but the water was an arm of the icy North Atlantic, and the tide went racing out to sea through the passage.
"Trim the bo't, sir," rejoined the man at the oars, in a tone of cheerful Yankee independence. "It's mortal hard pullin' in this
