The herald., 1897-08-15

climbed into his berth and began cough
ing persistently while he put his head
out to glare all round the forecastle.
There was no further protest. He fell
back on the pillow, and could be heard
there wheeling regularly like a man
oppressed in his Sleep
Sullivan stood at the door with his
face to the light and his back to the
darkness. And alone in the dim empti-
ness of the sleeping forecastle, he ap-
peared bigger, colossal, very old; old as
Father Time himself, who should have
come there into this place as quiet as
a sepulchre to contemplate with patient
eyes the short victory of sleep. the con-
soler. Yet he was only child of time
lonely relic of a devoured and for
| gotten generation. He stood, still
strong, as ever unthinking; ready
man with a vast empty past and with
no future, with his chldlike impulses
and his mans passions already dead
within his tattooed breast.
The men who could understand his
silence were gone-those men who knew
how to exist beyond the pale of life and
within sight of eternity. They had been
strong, as those are strong who know
neither doubts nor hopes. They had
been impatient and enduring, turbu-
lent and devoted, unruy and faithful.
Well-meaning people had tried to rep
resent those men as whining over every
mouthful of their food as going about
their work in fear of their lives. But
in truth they had been men who knew
toll, privation, violence, debauchery--
but knew not fear, and had no desire
of spite in their hearts. Men hard to
manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless
men--but men enough to scorn in their
hearts the sentimental voices that be-
walled the hardness of their fate. 1t
was fate unique and their own; the
capacity to bear it appeared to them
the privilege of the chosen; their gem
GRAFTON lived inarticulate and indis-
pensable, without knowing the sweet
ness of affections or the refuge of a
home; and died free from the dark
| menace of a narrow grave. They were
the everlasting children of the mysteri-
Gus sea. Their successors are the
grown-up children of a dscontented
earth-they are less naughty, but less
innocent; less profane, but perhaps also
less believing: If they had learned how
to speak they have also learned how to
whine. But the others We're strong and
mute; they were effaced, bowed and en-
| during, like stone caryatids that hold
up in the night the lighted halls of a
resplendent and glorious edifice. They
are gone now-and it does not matter
The sea and the earth are unfaithful
to their children: a truth, faith, a
generation of men goes-and is forgot
| ten,. and it does not matteri Except
perhaps, to the few of those who believ-
ed the truth, confessed the faith-or
loved the men.
! A breeze was coming. The ship that
had been lying tide-rode swung to a
heavier puff; and suddenly the slack
of the chain cable between the wind
lass and the hawse-pipe clinked, slipped
forward an inch, and rose gently off
the deck with a startling suggestion as
of unsuspected life that had been
| lurking stealthily in the iron. In the
hawse-pipe the grinding links sent
through the ship sound like low
groan of a man signing under a bur-
| den. The strain came on the windlass
| the chain tautened like a string, vi
brated-and the handle of the screw
brake moved in slight jerks. Sullivan
! stepped forward.
| Till then he had been standing medi-
tative and unthinking, reposeful and
hopeless, Win lace grim ana blank
a siXty-year- child of the mysterious
sea. The thoughts of all his lifetime
could have been expressed in six words,
but the stir of those things that were
as much part of -axistanee-es his
beating heart, called up a gleam of
alert understanding upon the sternness
of his aged face. The flame Of the lamp
swayod, and the old man, with knitted
and bushy eyebrows, stood over the
brake, watchful and motionless in the
wild saraband of dancing shadows.
Then the ship, obedient to the call of
her anchor, forged ahead slightly and
eased the strain. The cable relieved,
hung down, and after swaying imper-
ceptibly to and fro, dropped with loud
tap on the hardwood planks. Sullivan
seized the high lever, and, by a violent
| throw forward of his body, wrung out
another half-turn from the brake. He
recovered himself, breathed largely
and remained for awhile glaring down
| at the powerful and compact engine
that squatted on the deck at his feet,
amazing and tame.
''You-hold." he growled at it mas
| terfully, in the incult tangle of his
white beard.
TO BE CONTINUED.