g them into phantoms,
all seemingly eager to join in the mad revel of the storm. And the
lights at the mastheads, swooping now downward, now upward, now from
side to side, dappled the troubled waters with sickly gold. A desert
of marshes behind it, a limitless sea before it, gave to this brave old
city an isolation at once splendid and melancholy; and thrice
melancholy it stood this wild March night, witnessing as it did the
final travail of winter, pregnant with spring.

At seven o'clock the ice-clad packet from Dieppe entered the harbor and
dropped anchor. Among those who disembarked were two Jesuit priests
and an Iroquois Indian, who immediately set out for the episcopal
palace. They passed unobserved through the streets, for the blinding,
whirling snow turned them into shadow-shapes, or effaced them totally
from sight. Besides, wayfarers were few and the hardy mariners had by
this time sought the warm chimney in the favorite inn. For well they
knew that there were times when God wished to be alone with His sea;
and he was either a poor Catholic or a bad Huguenot who refused to be
convinced that the Master had contrived the sea and the storm for His
own especial pastime.

The favorite inn! What a call to food and wine and cheer the name of
the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the
mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath
one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages
were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed
flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the
mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar
inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and the bowl
of a Holland clay propped in a horny fist, he might listen tranquilly
to the sobbing of the tempest in the gaping chimney. What if the night
voiced its pains shrewdly, walls encompassed him; what if its frozen
tears melted on the panes or smoked on the trampled threshold, glowing
logs sent forth a permeating heat, expanding his sense of luxury and
content. What with the solace of the new-found weed, and the genial
brothers of the sea surrounding, tempests offered no terrors to him.

Listen. Perhaps here is some indomitable Ulysses, who, scorning a
blind immortalizer, recites his own rude Odyssey. What exploits! What
adventures on the broad seas and in the new-found wildernesses of the
West!