erful tales, all true.
But more wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they
argued and reasoned on their private businesses deep down below the
keel.

Long Jack's tastes ran more to the supernatural. He held them silent
with ghastly stories of the "Yo-hoes" on Monomoy Beach, that mock and
terrify lonely clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were
never properly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the
spirits of Kidd's men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over
Truro township; of that harbor in Maine where no one but a stranger
will lie at anchor twice in a certain place because of a dead crew who
row alongside at midnight with the anchor in the bow of their
old-fashioned boat, whistling--not calling, but whistling--for the soul
of the man who broke their rest.

Harvey had a notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount
Desert south, was populated chiefly by people who took their horses
there in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood
floors and Vantine portires. He laughed at the ghost-tales,--not as
much as he would have done a month before,--but ended by sitting still
and shuddering.

Tom Platt dealt with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old
Ohio in flogging days, with a navy more extinct than the dodo--the navy
that passed away in the great war. He told them how red-hot shot are
dropped into a cannon, a wad of wet clay between them and the
cartridge; how they sizzle and reek when they strike wood, and how the
little ship-boys of the Miss Jim Buck hove water over them and shouted
to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade--long weeks of
swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers
that had used up their coal (there was no chance for the
sailing-ships); of gales and cold that kept two hundred men, night and
day, pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigging,
when the galley was as red-hot as the fort's shot, and men drank cocoa
by the bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His service closed when
that thing was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a specious
invention in time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when sails
should come back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with
hundred-and-ninety-foot booms.

Manuel's talk was slow and gentle--all about pretty girls in Madeira
washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving
banan