nd Ephraim Savage were reckoning out the
hours before they would look upon their native land once more. To the
old seaman who was used to meeting and to parting it was a small matter,
but Amos, who had never been away before, was on fire with impatience,
and would sit smoking for hours with his legs astride the shank of the
bowsprit, staring ahead at the skyline, in the hope that his friend's
reckoning had been wrong, and that at any moment he might see the
beloved coast line looming up in front of him.

"It's no use, lad," said Captain Ephraim, laying his great red hand upon
his shoulder. "They that go down to the sea in ships need a power of
patience, and there's no good eatin' your heart out for what you can't
get."

"There's a feel of home about the air, though," Amos answered.
"It seems to whistle through your teeth with a bite to it that I never
felt over yonder. Ah, it will take three months of the Mohawk Valley
before I feel myself to rights."

"Well," said his friend, thrusting a plug of Trinidado tobacco into the
corner of his cheek, "I've been on the sea since I had hair to my face,
mostly in the coast trade, d'ye see, but over the water as well, as far
as those navigation laws would let me. Except the two years that I came
ashore for the King Philip business, when every man that could carry a
gun was needed on the border, I've never been three casts of a biscuit
from salt water, and I tell you that I never knew a better crossing than
the one we have just made."

"Ay, we have come along like a buck before a forest fire. But it is
strange to me how you find your way so clearly out here with never track
nor trail to guide you. It would puzzle me, Ephraim, to find America,
to say nought of the Narrows of New York."

"I am somewhat too far to the north, Amos. We have been on or about the
fiftieth since we sighted Cape La Hague. To-morrow we should make land,
by my reckonin'."

"Ah, to-morrow! And what will it be? Mount Desert? Cape Cod?
Long Island?"

"Nay, lad, we are in the latitude of the St. Lawrence, and are more like
to see the Arcadia coast. Then with this wind a day should carry us
south, or two at the most. A few more such voyages and I shall buy
myself a fair brick house in Green Lane of North Boston, where I can
look down on the bay, or on the Charles or the Mystic, and see the ships
comin' and goin'. So I would end my life in peace and quiet."

All day Amos Green, in spite of h