It was a rope flung high by the spume, and by its feeling Sandy knew it was a tarred trawl-line. It was a message from heaven. It was an answer to his desire. Or was it the sarcastic challenge of the worst surf that inhospitable coast had seen for many a year?

Sandy carefully drew the line in. He knew just what it was. It was a threestrand piece which had been stored away in one of the dories to use in the trawls. It was new and strong and long. That line, plus a man, was the only hope for the crew. It was a chance that might succeed only once in a thousand trials. It was sure suicide unless the miracle intervened. And when McKiver held it in his hands he rejoiced like the Son of the Morning. He threw his head high, and his eagerness and exhilaration could no more have been chained than the waves themselves.

First McKiver kicked off his waterlogged rubber boots. Then he divested himself of everything but his underclothes. He did not yet feel the cold; he felt only the opportunity. Blinded by snow and spray, drenched in every wave, assailed by the January cold that could devour at a gulp the hottest furnace in the land, Sandy McKiver stood for a moment ready for his plunge into the caldron of the surf.

"Pay it out easy!" he howled to Noah Lufkin, when he had made the end of the line fast about his waist. "You 'll hear from me, Noah. Don't haul her in too soon."

He passed the precious coil to the skipper, and dropped below the lanyards to the rail. For a moment he stood, a gaunt silhouette against the breaker and the foam. Then the next wave arose, gigantic, imperious, leaping. It frosted the wreck and swept irresistibly shoreward. Before it touched him Sandy McKiver raised his two clenched fists and uttered a hoarse cry of defiance. When it had plunged on, the hero was gone.

Only the skipper knew the struggle that now ensued. Paying out the line with the skill of a passed angler, now slowly, lest it tangle, now fast, lest it impede, he played McKiver with consummate art; for he was playing for life.

Now the battle between the storm and the man raged. But in the very hope of victory, a fierce breaker picked McKiver up in its teeth, shook him, and smashed him against a rock. It was a jagged rock,

and mechanically the man clutched it like a limpet. As the water receded it left him high and streaming, almost a part of the green fringe that dares the white cascades to tear it from its granite roots. But the fisherman blindly struggled a few steps up, and clung in a crevasse. Numb almost beyond movement, broken in bone, bruised of body, his will was still unfrozen and his soul unconquered.

Inch by inch he pulled himself up the glassy rocks until he fell in a puddle out of reach of the boiling breakers. It was below zero. The wind cut like Sulu swords, and the snow seared like frozen filings. It would not take McKiver long to freeze to death, and he knew it.

"Christ!" he ejaculated dumbly. This oath was the first prayer of his life. "It's got to be done, an' I'm the man to do it." He staggered to his feet. One leg was smashed from the knee down. He supported himself upon the other, fixing his bootless foot in a crack in the rock, and so he lay back again, ready for the awful tug which he knew could have only one end. His hands were too numb to tie the rope upon a rock. Still tied about his waist-he straightened and strained; it was his endurance against the life of twelve

men.

By this time the Finance was on her last legs.

"I've got the signal, and she 's tautening up!" cried the skipper in a lull. "If ye 're goin', it's got to be quick! Get down in there, George, an' let out a reef!"

And as George grasped the frail buoyline and hurled himself boldly into the white hell, the tide mercifully turned.

But Sandy McKiver felt the strain of water-swept weight. His muscles cracked, his waist was circled with flame, while his foot froze into the crack of the rock.

"God!" he cried. "If I could only see Kate and the kid! I'll bet she'd forgive me"

WHEN George Johnston crawled out of the deep and the frozen swirl, almost dead himself with the struggle, and followed the life-line up, he stooped and felt, and then uttered an oath commensurate to the sacrifice. He hurriedly unloosed the bowline from McKiver's waist, and hitched the trawl-line to a granite projection. Then

he fell upon his knees and began to chafe his unconscious savior.

One after the other, the crew of the Finance made the perilous journey from the broken vessel to the barren rock that lay a cable's-length from the mainland. Not a man of them was lost. By what the blind are accustomed to call a "freak" of Providence, the Finance held firm in her granite vise until Noah Lufkin, her skipper, found himself dashed upon the rock. By the loosening of the line he knew that the final catastrophe had come. His men hauled him in just before his freezing hands lost their hold.

Then the sea, thwarted and furious, hurled, as from a hundred bows, slivers of wreckage that smote and pierced the huddled group as they lay on the rock, clutching with bleeding fingers its jagged fissures, lest a roller higher than the last wash them to the edge, and they slide and become flotsam. For there they clung together, with McKiver in the middle, whether dead or dying, they knew not, and all they knew was that if God permitted them to live until morning, they would carry him ashore and give him a decent burial. So they caught the javelins and impaled them in the crevasses, and fastened themselves down.

Then there arose a wonder: this was a gale of frozen herring. These the sea in its final fury cast upon the men like flails -frozen ghosts of frozen fish. Only once in the memory of the Fairharbor fishingfleet has such a ghastly bombardment taken place. By twos, by threes, by dozens, by scores, the receding tide threw up on the apex of its foam the released bait. This the wind caught and shot like arrows at the crouching heads of the freezing men. If the tide had been coming instead of going, the story of McKiver could not have been told.

THE day dawned leisurely and with that exasperating unconsciousness of great disasters peculiar to nature. The sparse inhabitants of that cheerless Maine coast dreaded to look out that morning. The snow that for the last twenty-four hours had shut out one horror of the sea, but had left its rhythmic booming to irritate the nerves and the imagination, had now ceased. The cold day dawned. The sun arose. The storm had passed.

Now, one by one, faces peer anxiously through battered windows, and out of storm-pocked doors. Huge, oily waves thunder up the rocks and obliterate the view with their iridescent spray.

Round Rock stands out imperturbable -a glistening sentinel. But what is that black mass upon its top? The rising sea approaches it stealthily; each wave licks nearer. One old mariner after another brings out his long telescope and inspects the unusual phenomenon.

"My God! It 's men! Shipwrecked! Cast up in the night!"

But where is their vessel? Not a sign of ship or wreck. Are these specks children of the hurricane and of the sea-born in the night and thrust out upon the bleak? Simultaneously the little population gathered upon the shingle behind the rock. It did not take long to launch a dory with a couple of men in the swirl of the rushing tide. Behind gathered a row of gaunt women; some of them held fat children, who, awed by the solemnity of the scene, cuddled for protection. With eyes shaded by shawls, their mothers waited-fire in their hearts, but their impassive countenances graven by the custom of peril and of want.

The dory grated upon the lee of the rock. The men hauled her up and bounded to the top. The crew of the Finance had not passed into the Valley yet. The skipper opened his eyes and said:

"Take him first." With his last strength he jerked his eyes toward a huge broken figure, red-headed and snow-faced.

So they hauled poor McKiver out, and brought him ashore.

"Hurry him up to our house, the poor, poor man!" said one of the tall, gaunt women, who held a freckled baby in her arms. She spoke with a rich, womanly accent, and cuffed the baby because it howled. "Mother would n't hear to his goin' anywheres else," she added.

Then and thus a neighbor answered her: "I'm afraid he 's frozen stiff, but I reckon if any one kin bring him to, you kin, Kate. We'll fetch a pail o' snow, an' you kin rub him with that until the doctor come."

So they carried Sandy McKiver up the hill, and laid him on his wife's bed.

It was a fair spring day. The buds were green and full and bursting joyously. The

sun shone hot, and the birds caroled as if their throats would burst. The scant grass that fringed the coast-line looked thick and juicy. The poor little fishing-hamlet that in winter barely supported life lay in luxurious content and almost Oriental languor.

Then the sea-oh, how blue and peaceful! It just trembled a little in the warm, low wind, as if in ecstasy of mere existence. A baby could venture upon its bosom, so innocent of harm it looked, so devoid of cruelty. Dory fishermen were lazily baiting their lobster-pots, while from the precipitous ledge of Round Rock a group of boys were noisily catching cunners punctuating each new haul as it squirmed up into the undeflected sun with uproarious shrieks of glee that could be heard in the squat

houses on the shore.

Propped in an old-fashioned kitchen rocker, with his face to the sea, the sun bathing his covered limbs, a gaunt figure reclined. In his lap sat a fierce, frecklefaced baby, making desperate dabs at the man's brilliant red beard. This he would manage to pull, and receive a sharp rap as a reward of merit.

"Say, old gal," cried the father, holding the scratching and kicking infant at arm's-length, "this kid is worse 'n a dogfish. I reckon he takes arter his ma. Ho, ho!"

A tall, bony woman stooped and emerged from the doorway. "Sandy," she spoke in a high, quick tone, but her face showed the tenderness and content of a woman who is absolutely necessary to the man she loves,-"if yer don't cuff that little kid o' yourn mother says you'll spile him-you 'll spile him so he won't be wuth his weight in bait." She came and laid upon his shoulder her large, sudwhitened hand. This he gathered in his own at the risk of having his eyes gouged out by his son.

"Kate, old gal," his lips trembled, "I dunno how it come about. I 've been thinkin' an' a-thinkin' since the snow went how it happened that the sea cast me up in the only place on God's footstool that I wanted to be in. I guess it's becus I wanted yer so an' me heart le'pt to yer, an' I guess God understood me better 'n any one else, an' I could n't seem to die until I said, 'Kate, me old gal, will yer forgive me, so help me God?""

"There, there, Sandy," said Kate, " don't yer say no more, Sandy. Me an' the bebby hev forgiven an' forgotten long ago. Jes think; if it had n't happened as it did, I would n't hev come home to mother, and I would n't 'a' bin on hand to nuss yer, an' I'll bet no other woman could hev saved yer, Sandy. There was a time when neither you nor me saw any landin' ahead, Sandy; but God and the ocean-them two knew what they was about."

"An' I say, Kate (git down there, you imp o' Satan, yer!), I kin walk pooty well." McKiver stood up, turning his unbronzed and chalk-lined face to the receiving sun. He slipped a crutch under each arm and began to hobble, almost stumbling over his obstreperous child. "Ain't that fine! An' I'll be healed by June, the doctor says; then I'll teach those hollerin' boys a thing or two about cunnerin'."

Kate's eyes filled with tears as the hero showed his deformities. One leg was hopelessly bent, and the foot was gone, and the other foot was only a stump. His right hand had lost three fingers; but this was considered a minor subject, not worthy of comment. The fisherman's wife tried to speak, and could not. Suddenly she blurted

out:

"Capt'n John Foster is gittin' deef."
"Hey?"

I say, he 's gittin' deef."

"What 's that to me?" a little testily. "Oh, nothin' much. They say he's goin' to give up the post-office in June, an' thet there's a movement to put a feller called Sandy McKiver in. Did ye know, my father was postmaster once, an' they kinder want some one to represent the country as the folks respect-and-and-as is a man."

His wife came up and put her arm under his. "Lemme help yer, dear; you 're tired. You'd better git back to the chair an' lie in the sun. That's better 'n a whole school o' doctors. An', Sandy,-who cares?—as long as me an' the bebby has you."

It was McKiver's turn. He tried and tried again. Then he burst out like a great big boy:

"'T ain't me. It's you. Y-ye damned old angel, you! I say, it's as long as I have you I kin do anything. It's only to be with my wife-that 's all I care. There, there! Don't, Kate! For God's sake, don't!"

TH

HE curtain screening the more intimate life and manners of the Turk was first lifted by the white hand of an English ambassadress. In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Constantinople to fall in love with everything Turkish. In the warmth of her ardor she painted the East as the most perfect of countries. The climate, she vowed, was "delightful in the extremest degree." Turkey was the country where she found "women the freest, men the most faithful, religion the purest, and manners the most polite." If its beys, pashas, and effendis betrayed tendencies to an "amiable atheism," it was only that they might prove themselves the better wits.

This clever Englishwoman, to whom no subject was dull, was also "charmed with many points of the Turkish law-to our shame be it spoken, better designed and better executed than ours." Morality, indeed, in that "heathenish" country she found was at so surprisingly high a level that there was even a punishment for convicted liars.

For over a century and a half Lady Mary's sprightly pictures of the life of Turkish women have remained as the true Western ideals of the mysterious East. In a hundred and fifty years what changes! The Turk is now become the "unspeakable." Turkey is the nation above all others at which hands must be uplifted, eyes virtuously rolled, and the political garment withheld from compromising contact. Yet when one comes to know him, even a

little, the Turk is found to be neither so very terrible nor so hardened in his brutality as we had supposed him.

Whatever may be one's personal conviction concerning Turkey's deeds or her misdeeds, the interest this curious and fascinating country presents is perdurable. More closely allied to European sympathies and tastes than the more wholly alien races of China and India, Turkey is also compellingly attractive, and particularly to Americans, as still preserving to our eyes and ears certain vanished forms and customs.

"Our private life must be walled." This, the Asiatic rule of life, is the curtain that is rung down before the eager, searching Western gaze. Turkish interiors, both moral and domestic, are hedged about as by a triple wall. In spite of the innovations, changes, and reforms introduced by foreign models, the Turk continues to perpetuate, more or less unconsciously, the traditions of his fathers. To hold tight to the secret of one's inner life-this is in the blood of the Turk. Frankness is as foreign to the Moslem nature as is a subtle complexity of thought to the American.

In these more emancipated days Turkish reserve is occasionally seen to lower its vizor. On the slightest suspicion of indiscreet intrusion the movable face of the helmet is, however, quickly sealed tight to its clasp. to its clasp. A Turk nowadays may speak of his wife; he counts on your discretion to consider his mention of her as unuttered.