ities and
their defects. The stranger thanked her by a gesture full of gracious
dignity, and took his place between the young mother and the old
soldier. Immediately behind him sat a peasant and his son, a boy ten
years of age. A beggar woman, old, wrinkled, and clad in rags, was
crouching, with her almost empty wallet, on a great coil of rope that
lay in the prow. One of the rowers, an old sailor, who had known her in
the days of her beauty and prosperity, had let her come in "for the love
of God," in the beautiful phrase that the common people use.

"Thank you kindly, Thomas," the old woman had said. "I will say two
_Paters_ and two _Aves_ for you in my prayers to-night."

The skipper blew his horn for the last time, looked along the silent
shore, flung off the chain, ran along the side of the boat, and took up
his position at the helm. He looked at the sky, and as soon as they were
out in the open sea, he shouted to the men: "Pull away, pull with all
your might! The sea is smiling at a squall, the witch! I can feel the
swell by the way the rudder works, and the storm in my wounds."

The nautical phrases, unintelligible to ears unused to the sound of the
sea, seemed to put fresh energy into the oars; they kept time together,
the rhythm of the movement was still even and steady, but quite unlike
the previous manner of rowing; it was as if a cantering horse had broken
into a gallop. The gay company seated in the stern amused themselves by
watching the brawny arms, the tanned faces, and sparkling eyes of the
rowers, the play of the tense muscles, the physical and mental forces
that were being exerted to bring them for a trifling toll across the
channel. So far from pitying the rowers' distress, they pointed out the
men's faces to each other, and laughed at the grotesque expressions on
the faces of the crew who were straining every muscle; but in the fore
part of the boat the soldier, the peasant, and the old beggar woman
watched the sailors with the sympathy naturally felt by toilers who live
by the sweat of their brow and know the rough struggle, the strenuous
excitement of effort. These folk, moreover, whose lives were spent in
the open air, had all seen the warnings of danger in the sky, and their
faces were grave. The young mother rocked her child, singing an old hymn
of the Church for a lullaby.

"If we ever get there at all," the soldier remarked to the peasant, "it
will be because the Almighty is bent on keepin