e these--thick and broad about the chest and
lanky below, long-armed, hammer-fisted, with frowsy beards, bushy brows,
and clear blue eyes, which were fearless and quick to look.

"'Tis a fine harbour you got here, Skipper David Roth," they would say
to my father, when it came time to go aboard, "an' here, zur," raising
the last glass, "is t' the rocks that make it!"

"T' the schooners they shelter!" my father would respond.

When the weather turned civil, I would away to the summit of the
Watchman--a scamper and a mad climb--to watch the doughty little
schooners on their way. And it made my heart swell and flutter to see
them dig their noses into the swelling seas--to watch them heel and leap
and make the white dust fly--to feel the rush of the wet wind that drove
them--to know that the grey path of a thousand miles was every league of
the way beset with peril. Brave craft! Stout hearts to sail them! It
thrilled me to watch them beating up the suddy coast, lying low and
black in the north, and through the leaden, ice-strewn seas, with the
murky night creeping in from the open. I, too, would be the skipper of a
schooner, and sail with the best of them!

"A schooner an' a wet deck for me!" thought I.

And I loved our harbour all the more for that.

* * * * *

Thus, our harbour lay, a still, deep basin, in the shelter of three
islands and a cape of the mainland: and we loved it, drear as it was,
because we were born there and knew no kinder land; and we boasted it,
in all the harbours of the Labrador, because it was a safe place,
whatever the gale that blew.

II

The WORLD From The WATCHMAN

The Watchman was the outermost headland of our coast and a landmark from
afar--a great gray hill on the point of Good Promise by the Gate; our
craft, running in from the Hook-an'-Line grounds off Raven Rock, rounded
the Watchman and sped thence through the Gate and past Frothy Point into
harbour. It was bold and bare--scoured by the weather--and dripping wet
on days when the fog hung thick and low. It fell sharply to the sea by
way of a weather-beaten cliff, in whose high fissures the gulls, wary of
the hands of the lads of the place, wisely nested; and within the
harbour it rose from Trader's Cove, where, snug under a broken cliff,
stood our house and the little shop and storehouse and the broad
drying-flakes and the wharf and fish-stages of my father's business.
From the top there wa