CAPTAIN CHRISTY
I
The harbor, brimful with the tide, was blue as morning sky, and motionless as high summer clouds. Along the grass-grown wharves,—silver-gray piles which crumbled at the ends into a jackstraw heap of rotting logs,—there was no human stir. Over one gray shanty the red ensign, a fold showing the yellow crown of Her Majesty's customs, hung limp from the staff. The thirty-foot flood had moved in imperceptibly, and lay, from the wharves to the distant islands, like a floor of steel. The masts of pinkies at their moorings plunged in deep, straight lines of black reflection, save where some profound, mysterious tremor of the tide shivered the mirror, and sent the phantom spars in wriggling fragments to the depths. A lone sandpiper, skimming the surface, mated with a flying shadow; and two or three, wheeling together, doubled into a little flock that
