t they could do and what they couldn't. They were his swirls,
really,--for he had placed every individual fragment of the
obstructions that caused them with his own hands, in thirty feet of
water.

Some three years before the site had been marked by a spindle bearing
an iron cage and fastened to a huge boulder known as Shark Ledge Rock,
and covered at low water. The unloading of various sloops and schooners
under his orders had enlarged this submerged rock to a miniature
island, its ragged crest thrust above the sea. This obstruction to the
will of the wind and tide, and the ever-present six-mile current,
caused by the narrowing of Long Island Sound in its onrush to the sea,
acted as a fallen log that blocks a mountain stream, or a boulder that
plugs a torrent. That which for centuries had been a steady "set" every
six hours east and west, had now become a "back-and-in suck" fringed by
a series of swirling undercurrents dealing death and destruction to the
ignorant and unwary.

Not been long since a schooner loaded with concrete had been saved from
destruction by the merest chance, and later on a big scow caught in the
swirl had parted her buoy lines and would have landed high and dry on
the stone pile had not Captain Joe run a hawser to her, twisted its
bight around the drum of his engine and warped her off just in time to
save her bones from sea worms.

As the tug approached, the Ledge, looming up on the dim horizon line,
looked like a huge whale spouting derricks, a barnacle of a shanty
clinging to its back. Soon there rose into relief the little knot of
men gathered about one of the whale's fins--our landing stage,--and
then, as we came alongside, the welcome curl of the smoke, telling of
fried pork and saleratus biscuit.

Captain Joe's orders now came thick and fast.

"Hurry dinner, Nichols,"--this to the shanty cook, who was leaning out
of the galley window,--"And here,--three or four o' ye, git this divin'
stuff ashore, and then all hands to dinner. The wind's ag'in
Baxter,--he won't git here for an hour. Startin' on one o' them long
legs o' his'n now,"--and the captain's eye rested on the sloop beating
up Fisher's Island way.

"And, Billy,--'fore ye go ashore, jump into the yawl and take a look at
that snatch block on the spar buoy,--that clam digger may want it 'fore
night."

This spar buoy lay a few hundred yards off the Whale's Snout. Loaded
vessels were moored to this quill bob, held in place by a f