l--I'd
like to do it all my life!"

Slower, more fearfully, I drew near. Would anything happen to spoil it
all? There she lay, the long white ship, laden deep, settled low in the
water. I could see the lines of little dark men heaving together at the
ropes. Each time they hove they sang the refrain, which, no doubt, was
centuries old, a song of the winds, the big bullies of the ocean,
calling to each other as in some wild storm at sea they buffeted the
tiny men who clung to the masts and spars of ships:

"Blow the man down, bullies,
Blow him right down!
Hey! Hey! Blow the man down!
Give us the time to blow the man down!"

But what were the verses? I could hear the plaintive tenor voice of the
chantyman who sang them--now low and almost mournful, now passionate,
thrilling up into the night, as though yearning for all that was hid in
the heavens. Could a man like that feel things like that? But what were
the words he was singing, this yarn he was spinning in his song?

I came around by the foot of the slip and walked rapidly up the dockshed
toward one of its wide hatchways. The singing had stopped, but as I drew
close a rough voice broke the silence:

"Sing it again, Paddy!"

I looked out. Close by on the deck, in the hard blue glare of an
arc-light, were some twenty men, dirty, greasy, ragged, sweating, all
gripping the ropes and waiting for Paddy, who rolled his quid in his
mouth, spat twice, and then began:

"As I went awalking down Paradise Street
A pretty young maiden I chanced for to meet."

A heave on the ropes and a deafening roar:

"Blow the man down, bullies,
Blow him right down!
Hey! Hey! Blow the man down!"

Again the solo voice, plaintiff and tender:

"By her build I took her for Dutch.
She was square in the stuns'l and bluff in the bow."

The rest was a detailed account of the night spent with the maiden. Roar
on roar rose the boisterous chorus: "Blow the man down, bullies, blow
him right down!" The big patched, dirty sails went jerking and flapping
up toward the stars, which from here were so faint they could barely be
seen. And the ship moved out on the harbor.

"There go the folk songs of the seas," I thought disgustedly, looking
out on the water now showing itself grease-mottled in the first raw
light of day.

I tried other songs with my artist's ears and found them all much like
the first, the music like the very stars, the words like the