. MARY AT WORK AGAIN 279

XX. FATHER MCQUEEN'S RETURN 292

THE HARBOR MASTER

CHAPTER I

BLACK DENNIS NOLAN

At the back of a deep cleft in the formidable cliffs, somewhere between
Cape Race to the southward and St. John's to the northward, hides the
little hamlet of Chance Along. As to its geographical position, this is
sufficient. In the green sea in front of the cleft, and almost closing
the mouth of it, lie a number of great boulders, as if the breech in the
solid cliff had been made by some giant force that had broken and
dragged forth the primeval rock, only to leave the refuse of its toil to
lie forever in the edge of the tide, to fret the gnawing currents. At
low tide a narrow strip of black shingle shows between the nearer of
these titanic fragments and the face of the cliff. The force has been
at work at other points of the coast as well. A mile or so to the north
it has broken down and scattered seaward a great section of the cliff,
scarring the water with a hundred jagged menaces to navigation, and
leaving behind it a torn sea front and a wide, uneven beach. About three
miles to the south of the little, hidden village it has wrought similar
havoc, long forgotten ages ago.

Along this coast, for many miles, treacherous currents race and shift
continually, swinging in from the open sea, creeping along from the
north, slanting in from the southeast and snarling up (but their
snarling is hidden far below the surface) from the tide-vexed,
storm-worn prow of old Cape Race. The pull and drift of many of these
currents are felt far out from land, and they cannot be charted because
of their shiftings, and their shiftings cannot be calculated with any
degree of accuracy, because they seem to be without system or law. These
are dangerous waters even now; and before the safeguard of a strong
light on the cape, in the days when ships were helplessly dragged by the
sea when there was no wind to drive them--in the days before a
"lee-shore" had ceased to be an actual peril to become a picturesque
phrase in nautical parlance--they constituted one of the most notorious
disaster-zones of the North Atlantic.

We are told, as were our fathers before us, that one man's poison may be
another man's meat, and that it is an ill wind indeed that does not blow
an advantage to somebody. The fundamental truths of these ancient saws
were fully realized by the people o