able size
on the fly. In those days a deep-sea fisherman, hauling in a
respectable cod, was likely to find adventure enough with the
situation suddenly reversed and a horse mackerel hauling in the
line with the fisherman, on the end of it.

It is leviathans of the deep like these that Jason Theseus and
their companion Greeks bear in mind as the Argo drifts and the
catch steadily grows. By and by the low sun flares red through
surly clouds of nightfall. The sea is getting up and it is a long
sail up the coast to the lee of the outer light. Then with
darkness gathering and a head wind and tide the real glory of the
day comes. Out of the black west blows half a gale. The waves curl
in ghostly phosphorescence and the merry men dance wildly in Hull
Gut. It is a long and dogged fight to win through these against
the swift tide to the comparative safety of the shelter of
Peddocks, where you catch the back wash that helps you well along
the lee of Prince's Head.

And so the Argonauts sail westward again in the pitch blackness of
the gathering storm. They know the harbor floor as they know the
floors of their homes and can as well feel their way. What if the
falling tide leaves the flats bare and they may not win to the
mooring, but must lie at anchor off the channel edge until morning
shows gray through the rain? They have won the golden fleece of
adventure from the blue sea to eastward and sailed home with it.

CHAPTER XIV

VOICES OF THE BROOKSIDE

For two hundred years the water has rippled over the sill on which
once firmly set the gate to the old milldam. Of the mill, save
this, no sliver of wood remains, and even the tradition of the
miller and his work is gone. We merely know that here stood one of
the grist mills of the early pioneers, a mill to which the
neighbors brought their corn in sacks, perchance upon their
shoulders, and after the wheel had turned and the grist was
ground, carried the meal off in the same way. Thus rapidly does
the smoothing hand of time wipe out man and his works.

But still the water ripples over the old, brown oak sill, and he
who listens may hear the brook telling a story all day long in
purling undertones. I fancy its language a simple one, too, but
its words of one syllable tumble so swiftly over one another that,
in spite of their liquid purity of tone, I never quite catch them.
It is the brook's rapidity of utterance that troubles me. I am
quite sure, always, that if I r