perfection. There were the shelves, with food in orderly array, with dishes in their place, and tools and linen; with a place for nautical instruments and a place for cameras, with racks for paints and for paper, and clever little holders for brushes and pens. The stove was polished, and the beds were made all sweet and clean for night. It was so perfect that I resented the little pool of water that had leaked up from the bilge as we heeled over. I take a cup to bail it out, and meanwhile chat through the open companionway with my mate.

§ 6

"With the wind holding like this," he said, "we should make Willis Bay by five o'clock this afternoon." It is now about eleven, and we have been an hour and a half on our way. We have covered maybe twelve miles; good sailing. Our course lies straight for Cape Valentine, on Dawson Island. We talk of our plans and when we 'll get to where, and of our ship and the perfection of her sailing, and how she lifts to every sea, how dry she is, how strong, how perfect. And all the time I'm bailing. It occurs to me presently that I'd have done better to have taken a kettle to bail with rather than a cup. Itake a kettle. We're leaning We're leaning so in the fresh gale that I must plant one foot up on the side to keep my balance. The mate is singing; he 's in love, and she is seven thousand miles away. I know the softness of my hard mate's heart; great happiness brings yearning.

"I'm sorry." In my haste I 've poured a kettle of cold water on his legs. I'm bailing fast. God! is the water rising? It is; my foot slips, and it fills my shoes. I'm standing in the

water now, using a twelve-quart pail to dip it up. I brace my legs and work.

A quarter of an hour has passed. I'm bailing furiously, emptying the pails at random over the mate, his tender heart, and everything. There is no time for thought; the water is to my knees. We've changed our course, to run for the windward shore, fifteen miles away. In turn about we work, work to exhaustion, each of us. And steadily the water rises. The gale is heavy, and the sea runs high. Then the truth dawns: we 're sinking.

All hands on deck to lower sail! The gaff jambs, and the mate scrambles aloft and tramples on it. In a fury of beating and slatting down it comes, and we lie hove-to under the staysail. The skiff that we carry on the deck is eight feet long, four wide, flat-bottomed; it 's of no conceivable use in a sea. Nevertheless, we launch it and secure it astern, and I begin with canvas and tacks to deck it over in some fashion. This finished, I stow lifebelts and a few necessities on board, stick my opened clasp-knife in the bow, and the life-boat is ready.

From the skiff the forlorn condition of the Kathleen is apparent. She lies sodden in the water, with her deck awash and lists heavily. As I climb on board I have suddenly the most poignant realization of the utter hopelessness of our situation. In a flash I see my life as a thing of tragic incompletion; there's a swift pageant of loved ones weeping, an instant of vertigo, a griping of the bowels, as though I hung over an immense and sheer abyss; and then as swiftly courage reasserts itself, sweeps memory and fear aside, and leaves me with energy and a clear mind to act. Down

in the cabin, almost to his waist in water, the mate is bailing with the strength of desperation, bailing and singing. In a wild, strong, rich young voice he 's singing "Smiles." And suddenly I understand. And deep within me I laugh, for I have seen that even the brave are touched by fear.

There in the cabin, seated in a flooded bunk, with the icy water washing over my knees, I take the log-book of the Kathleen, and on the clean first page write this:

"First day out, three hours from sailing. Boat half-full of water, hove-to. Bailing in turns. Life boat equipped to cross to Porvenir. Strong west wind blowing. Mate singing; great fellow. No chance to save anything; life-boat is too small."

Then tying up a few special treasures in a water-tight package, I 'm ready.

My

I am a man of calculating intelligence. I had observed the steady rise of the water in the cabin, and had marked its rate. We are tired, and incapable of any greater effort. reason has proved conclusively that in ten minutes more the Kathleen will have sunk. My mate was gifted with many good qualities; he had courage and good nature, dogged perseverance, and a giant's strength. He had virtually no intelligence, and it was almost pathetic to see him in the face of the quite apparent futility of bailing continue to ply the heavy pail to the rhythm of his everlasting "Smiles." As I sat there and watched him,there was room for only one to work at a time, there came over me a sense of utter humiliation and shame at this dismal ending on the very day of its beginning of an enterprise that had cost such labor and such love.

The minutes sped, the fellow bailed, and still we floated. Ten minutes passed, and twenty. As time goes on, and we continue alive, a new energy possesses us; it is scarcely hope, but rather an animation of the spirit that the reasoning mind denies. Due to the swashing about of the flood, it was difficult to determine what progress the water made. We watched it with the intensity of men awaiting death; and yet when, after an hour of strained anxiety and unremitting work, we knew beyond all doubt that we had checked its rise, it was without emotion that we received our lives again.

It was by now perhaps two in the afternoon; we had stopped the water, but it still stood nearly knee-deep in the cabin and required continuous bailing to hold it. Ruined supplies of every kind floated about, and our fair ship, four hours ago so trim and beautiful, was now the picture of desolation. We bailed; the afternoon sped on; and with the close of the day the wind and sea abated. We took in so little water now that every minute showed it lower; and presently, with only a foot's depth in the cabin, we hoisted a reefed mainsail, came about, and started for the lee shore, some miles away.

The afternoon increased in beauty and in peacefulness, and, as the certainty of our security became established, profound contentment rose like the morning sun within us. Life is so rich that nothing matters only that we live.

Evening comes on; the shadows of the land creep out and cover us. It's cold. With the last breath of wind we reach our anchorage.

It is the close of the first day of a four months' cruise, and, strained and

S

HE is identified in my mind, and always will be somehow, with the country in which I first saw her, a land, as it were, of milk and honey. When I think of her and the dreary, commonplace, brown farm-house, in a doorway of which I first saw her framed, and later of the wee, but cleanly, cabin in which I saw her lying at rest, I think of smooth green hills that rise in noble billows, of valleys so wide and deep that they could hold a thousand cottage farms, of trees that were globe-like from being left unharried by the winds, of cattle red and black and white and black, great herds dotting the hills, and of barns so huge that they looked more like great hangars for flying-machines than storehouses for hay and grain. Yes, everywhere was plenty, rich fields of wheat and corn and rye and oats, with here and there specializing farmers who grew only tomatoes or corn or peas or ran dairies, men who somehow seemed to grow richer than the others.

And then I think of "Fred" Hauchawout, her father, a man who evidently so styled himself, for the name was painted in big black letters over the huge door of his great red barn. This Hauchawout was a rude, crude, bearlike soul, stocky, high-booted, sandyhaired, gray-eyed and red-skinned, as well as inhospitable. He was clad always, on Sunday and every other day, so I heard, in worn brown overalls

and jumper. In short, he was one of those dreadful, tramping, laboring grubs who gather and gather and gather, sparing no least grain for pleasure by the way; and having so done, dying and leaving it all to children who have been alienated in youth and care no least whit whether their forebear is alive or dead, nor for anything save the goods which belike he has been able to amass. But in this latter sense Hauchawout was no huge success, either. He was too limited in his ideas to do more than hide or reinvest in land or cattle or bank his moderate earnings at a low rate of interest. He was quoted locally as living up to his assertion that "no enimel gets fet py me," and he was known far and wide for having the thinnest and boniest and hardestworked horses and cows in the neighborhood, from which he extracted the last ounce of labor and the last gill of milk.

He was the father of three sons and two daughters, so I was told, all of whom must have hated him; those I knew did, anyhow. For one of the sons, when first I wandered into the region, had already gone to the far West, after pausing to throw a pitchfork at his father and telling him to go to hell, or so the story went. Another, whom I knew quite well, being a neighbor of a relative of mine, had married after being "turned out," as

he said, by "the old man" because he would n't work hard enough. And yet he was a good enough worker to take over and pay for a farm of forty acres of fertile land in seven years, also eventually to acquire an automobile, a contraption which his father denounced as "a loafer's buggy."

The third son, Samuel, had also left his father because of a quarrel over his very human desire to marry and make his own way, a change which his father did not seem to sympathize with. Latterly, because he was greedy like his father and hoped to obtain an undue share of the estate at his death, or so his relatives said, he had made friends with his father, and thereafter exchanged such greetings and visits as two such peculiar souls might enjoy. They were always fighting, the second son told me (the one who had acquired forty acres and an automobile), being friendly one month or so and the next not, moods and differing interests dictating their volatile and varying approaches and understandings.

In addition, there were two daughters, Effie, a woman of twenty-nine or thirty, who at the age of twenty-one had run away to a near-by great city and found work in a laundry never to return, since her father would not let her have a beau; and finally Ida, the subject of this sketch, whom I first saw when she was twenty-eight and already looked much of the care and disappointment with which apparently her life had been freighted. For, besides being hard on "enimels," Hauchawout was hard on human beings and seemed to look upon them as mere machines like himself. It was said that he was up at dawn or earlier, with the first crow of his roosters, and the last to go to bed at night. Henry

Hauchawout, the son I knew best, once confessed to me that his father would "swear like hell" if all his children were not up within five minutes after he was. His wife, a worn and abused woman, had died at forty-three, and he had never married, but not from loyalty. Did he not have Ida? He had no religion, of course, none other than the need of minding your own business and getting as much money as possible to bury away somewhere. And yet his children seemed not so hard; rather sentimental and human, reactions, no doubt, from the grinding atmosphere from which they had managed finally to extricate themselves.

But it is of Ida that I wish to speak -Ida, whom I first saw when my previously mentioned relative suggested that I go with him to find out if Hauchawout had any hay to sell. "You'll meet a character well worth the skill of any portrayer of fact," he added. It was Ida who came to the door in answer to a loud "Hallo!" however, and I saw a woman prematurely old or overworked, drab and yet robust, a huge creature with small and rather nervous eyes, red, sunburned face and hands, a small nose, and faded red hair done into a careless knot at the back of her head. At the request of my "in-law" to know where her father was, she pointed to the barn. "He just went out to feed the pigs," she added. We swung through a narrow gate and followed a well fenced road to the barn, where, just outside a great pen containing perhaps thirty pigs, stood Hauchawout, a pail in each hand, his brown overalls stuck in his boots, gazing reflectively at his grunting property.

"Nice pigs, eh, Mr. Hauchawout?" commented my relative.