in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the
rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August. They lay on the deck
with bare feet and arms, telling 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 flourished 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 Harbor, 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 s