e
who were not doing so well. And of course, too, no seiner could ever
resist anybody who talks to him in a nice friendly way like that.

The skipper's doings ashore interested all of his crew, of course,
although me, perhaps, more than anybody else, unless it was Clancy. I
got pretty regular bulletins from my cousin Nell. She was for the
skipper, first, last and all the time.

"I like him," she said to me more than a dozen times. "I do like him,
but I never imagined that a man who does so well at sea could shrink
into himself as he does. Why, you almost have to haul him out by the
ears ashore. If it weren't for me I really believe--" and she
stopped.

But I thought I understood what she meant. "Meaning your chum, Alice
Foster?" I said.

"Yes, meaning my chum, Alice Foster. Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I think she's a kind of a frost."

"No, she isn't a frost, and don't you come around here again and tell
me so."

Nor did I, for I would not have an argument with Nell for all the
Alice Fosters in the world, for if Nell were anybody else but my first
cousin, I think I would have fallen in love with her myself.

And then we put out to sea and again we were living the life of
seiners, having it hard and easy in streaks. There were the times when
we went along for a week and did not do a tap but eat, sleep, stand a
trick at the wheel, a watch to the mast-head, and skylark around the
deck, and read, or have a quiet game of draw or whist or seven-up
below. But again there were times when we were on fish, and our
skipper being a driver, it was jump, jump, jump for a week on end.
There was that time in August when the fish were so plentiful on
Georges Bank, when, standing to the mast-head, you could see nothing
but mackerel schooling for fifteen or twenty miles either side of the
vessel. But, oh, they were wild! A dozen times we'd heave the
seine--put off from the vessel, put out that two hundred and odd
fathom of twine, drive seine-boat and dory to the limit, purse in--and
not so much as a single mackerel caught by the gills. That happened
fifteen or twenty times some days, maybe. We got our fill of sets that
month. But then again there was a week off Cape Cod and in the Bay of
Fundy and off the Maine coast when we ran them fresh to Boston market,
when we landed more mackerel it was said in a single week than was
ever landed before by one vessel. We were five days and five nights
that time without seeing our b