rds for days with axes when he was making a
passage."

Minnie Arkell filled another glass of champagne for Clancy, and Clancy
didn't give the fizz too much time to melt away either.

"These men are the real things," she said, but Clancy, for fear we
were getting too much credit, broke in, "Not us seiners. It's the
winter fishermen--trawlers and hand-liners--that are the real things.
Of course, we lose men now and then seining, but it's in winter up on
the shoal water on the Banks that--there's where you have some seas
to buck against," and he went on to tell of a battle with a gale on a
winter's night on the Grand Banks. Clancy could tell a story as well
as anybody I ever met. He could make the blood jump to your heart, or
the tears to your eyes--or he could chill you till the blood froze.
When he got through you could hear them all breathing--men and women
both, like people who had just run a race. "Two hundred and odd men
sailing out of Gloucester," he said, "went down that night. There
weren't too many came safe out of that blow. The father of this boy
here was lost--the Mary Buckley warn't it, Joe?--named for your
mother?"

"And my father, too, was lost soon after," said Minnie Arkell, and the
glance she gave me melted a lot of prejudice I had felt for her. That
was the good human side to her.

"No better man ever sailed out of Gloucester, Mrs. Miner," said
Clancy.

She flushed up. "Thank you, Tommie, for that, though I know he was a
reckless man." And, she might have added, he left some of his
recklessness in the blood of the Arkells.

The skipper told them a lot about sea life that night. Some of the
stories he told, though long known in Gloucester, they took to be
yarns at first. They could not believe that men went through such
things and lived. And then the skipper had such an easy way of telling
them. After a man has been through a lot of unusual things--had them
years behind him and almost forgotten them--I suppose they don't
surprise him any more.

The skipper looked well that night. When he warmed up and his eyes
took on a fresh shine and his mouth softened like a woman's, I tell
you he was a winner. I could not help comparing him with the
steam-yacht owner, who was a good-looking man, too, but in a different
way. Both of them, to look at, were of the same size. Both had their
clothes made by tailors who knew their business and took pains with
the fitting, though it was easy to fit men like Clancy