le the shipwrecked men were taken below to be
given warm drinks, food, and dry clothing.

"Will not their schooner drift about in the path of passing ships?"
asked the new voyager.

"No, I fancy not," said the veteran; "she will--look!" At that instant
the little schooner's stem rose high into the air, where it hung poised
for a moment. Then she was swiftly absorbed by the pitiless sea, and her
fluttering ensign made a bright spot above a patch of angry green for a
moment and was gone.

"I never saw a sadder sight," said the new voyager, gazing with humid
eyes upon the blank sea.

"There is none sadder," replied the veteran passenger.

They all returned to their snug seats under the lee of the deck-house,
and for a long time were lost in meditation. Then the new voyager looked
up and said, "I should like to hear their story."

"That is possible," answered the veteran; "come."

The Captain of the _Mohawk_ was found and the request made. He sent for
the skipper of the lost schooner, and said: "Do you feel able now to
tell me your story? If so, these gentlemen also would like to hear it."

"Well, Captain," began the wrecked skipper, "it's a common enough story,
that's a fact, sir, and I reckon it hasn't anything in it that you never
heard before, though perhaps some of your passengers here never got
nearer to it than a newspaper at a breakfast table. That was the
schooner _Mary Anthony_, from Gloucester, and I'm her master--that is, I
was--Joshua Clark by name, and the boy's my son on his first v'yage.
That schooner was about all I had in the world, gentlemen, for I owned
her myself, and when she went down a little while ago the hard work of
seventeen years went down with her. But I s'pose I mustn't complain,
because we take our lives and fortunes in our hands whenever we come out
to the Banks to fish, and that's a fact. We got under way from
Gloucester on as sweet a morning as ever you saw, gentlemen, with a
whole-sail breeze from the southwest. The _Mary Anthony_ was a smart
sailer, though I do say it, and she wasn't long in getting the land
below the horizon, and that's a fact. When we reached the Banks we found
a fairly large fleet on the ground, and we were soon at work among the
best of them. It isn't worth while trying to describe the mere matter of
fishing to you, gentlemen, because, of course, that isn't what you want
to hear about. It's enough for me to say that we'd been on the Banks
three days and had