[THE ACCOMMODATING ISLAND.]
ONE OF THE OLD SAILOR'S YARNS.
BY W. J. HENDERSON.
t was a southeasterly morning before a rainy day. The world was a palette of low-toned grays, greens, and purples, with here and there a bright flash of golden-yellow where the sun's rays fell through a rift in the shifting clouds and touched the young grass. The sea was a greenish-gray, patterned with dark wrinkles and white scars of foam. There was yet no swell, for only a fresh breeze was blowing, and the sea had not made up. The sky was a vast tangle of gray and blue-black clouds, varying in shape from long wisps, through smokelike tufts, down to the verge of the southerly horizon, where there was a solid sheet of that hazy blue which marks the presence of rain. The clam fleet was galloping homeward with lifted sheets and bellying jibs. The fishermen were holding on till the last minute, with their light anchors down in six fathoms of water, and their green sea-skiffs dancing on the young windrows of salt spume. A Nova Scotia bark, apple-bowed, wall-sided, and square-sterned, was going out in tow of a squat and puffy tug. The bark had all her three-cornered staysails set, and two or three hands were aloft loosing the topsails, after the manner of men to whom a month more or less on a voyage is not to be considered.
The Old Sailor sat on the end of the pier and gazed at the bark. Ever and anon he bowed his head and shook with one of his hearty fits of silent laughter. Henry and George were standing on the shore opposite the pier, and they were certain that the bark had reminded their old friend of something interesting. So they walked out on the pier and sat down beside him.
"Here we are," said Henry.
"Yes, here we are," added George.
"W'ich the same bein' here," said the Old Sailor, gravely, "it are necessitous fur me to recommember somethin'." He paused for a moment, gazed at the bark, and said: "W'ich way are the wind?"
"Southeast," replied George.