ast wrack."

"Without blood on it, my son?"

"Widout so much as a drop o' blood on it, so help me Saint Peter!"

"And the other lads, Denny? Are ye the only one in the harbor able to
pay me something for the building of a church?"

There was the one question on the good priest's tongue and another in
his clear eyes.

"I bes skipper, father dear, an' takes skipper's shares and pays
skipper's shares," replied Nolan. "But for me there'd not bin one bottle
o' wine come to us from the wrack an' the poor folks aboard her would
never have got ashore in their boats for want of a light on the
land-wash. As I kin spare ye fifty pounds for the holy work, yer
reverence, there bes nineteen men o' this harbor kin each be sparin' ye
ten."

Father McQueen nodded his gray head.

"Then we'll have the little church, Denny," he said. "Aye, lad, we'll
have the little church shining out to sea from the cliffs above Chance
Along."

Father McQueen was a good man and a good priest, and would as readily
have given his last breath as his last crust of bread in the service of
his Master; but for the past thirty years he had lived and worked in a
land of rocks, fogs and want, among people who snatched a livelihood
from the sea with benumbed fingers and wrists pitted deep with scars of
salt-water boils. He had seen them risk their lives for food on the
black rocks, the grinding ice and the treacherous tide; and now his
heart felt with their hearts, his eyes saw with their eyes. Their bitter
birthright was the harvest of the coastwise seas; and he now realized
their real and ethical right to all that they might gather from the
tide, be it cod, caplin, herrings or the timbers and freights of wrecked
ships. He saw that a wreck, like a good run of fish, was a thing to
profit by thankfully and give praise to the saints for; but he held that
no gift of God was to be gathered in violence. In the early years of his
work he had heard rumors and seen indications of things that had fired
him with a righteous fury and pity--rumors and hints of mariners
struggling landward only to be killed like so many seals as they
reached the hands to which they had looked for succor. The poor savages
who had committed such crimes as this had at first failed to understand
his fury and disgust; but with his tongue and his strong arms he had
driven into their hearts the fear of Holy Church and of the Reverend
Patrick McQueen. Even the wildest and dullest members of hi