anding, I saw that all the boats
were beached, and the slack water period of the early afternoon
prevailed. Nothing was going on, not even the most leisurely of
occupations, like baiting trawls or mending nets, or repairing lobster
pots; the very boats seemed to be taking an afternoon nap in the sun.
I could hardly discover a distant sail as I looked seaward, except a
weather-beaten lobster smack, which seemed to have been taken for a
plaything by the light airs that blew about the bay. It drifted and
turned about so aimlessly in the wide reach off Burnt Island, that I
suspected there was nobody at the wheel, or that she might have parted
her rusty anchor chain while all the crew were asleep.

I watched her for a minute or two; she was the old Miranda, owned by
some of the Caplins, and I knew her by an odd shaped patch of newish
duck that was set into the peak of her dingy mainsail. Her vagaries
offered such an exciting subject for conversation that my heart rejoiced
at the sound of a hoarse voice behind me. At that moment, before I
had time to answer, I saw something large and shapeless flung from the
Miranda's deck that splashed the water high against her black side,
and my companion gave a satisfied chuckle. The old lobster smack's sail
caught the breeze again at this moment, and she moved off down the bay.
Turning, I found old Elijah Tilley, who had come softly out of his dark
fish-house, as if it were a burrow.

"Boy got kind o' drowsy steerin' of her; Monroe he hove him right
overboard; 'wake now fast enough," explained Mr. Tilley, and we laughed
together.

I was delighted, for my part, that the vicissitudes and dangers of the
Miranda, in a rocky channel, should have given me this opportunity to
make acquaintance with an old fisherman to whom I had never spoken. At
first he had seemed to be one of those evasive and uncomfortable persons
who are so suspicious of you that they make you almost suspicious of
yourself. Mr. Elijah Tilley appeared to regard a stranger with scornful
indifference. You might see him standing on the pebble beach or in a
fish-house doorway, but when you came nearer he was gone. He was one of
the small company of elderly, gaunt-shaped great fisherman whom I used
to like to see leading up a deep-laden boat by the head, as if it were
a horse, from the water's edge to the steep slope of the pebble beach.
There were four of these large old men at the Landing, who were the
survivors of an earlie