Cross-Cultural Journalism And Strategic

Communication: Storytelling And

Built using the hands-on and pioneering Missouri Method, this textbook
Diversity
prepares readers to write about and communicate with people of
different backgrounds, offering real-world examples of how to practice
excellent journalism and strategic communi

Author: Earnest L Perry

ISBN: 9780429948824
Category: Adult
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 Cross-Cultural Journalism And Strategic
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.
scented thicket, patches of wild flowers, and above all the towering
pines, with their incessant murmur as though they were answering
their big brother, the sea.
The stadium was a great wooden amphitheater, built roughly but
strongly, and roofed to protect its audiences against sudden summer
showers. The second Sunday the girls had gone, there had been a
thunder storm, and it had seemed so strange to watch the trees
lashed and torn by the tempest, while they sat under cover safe as
could be.
“I never was so near a storm, and yet out of it,” Sue had declared.
“Why, you could have reached out, and patted the wind on the back,
and it couldn’t have hurt you.”
After service they walked slowly down the winding, rustic walk
that led to the shore.
“It seems to me, girls, that the service sounds ever so much more
solemn here than it does in a church,” Isabel was saying. “It seems
so much nearer heaven here in the woods.”
“But it’s not, really,” Kate put in, briskly. “That’s only an idea that
people have, and I think it’s wrong. Supposing God dwelt only in the
high places, what would become of those who sit in darkness, and
the shadow of death?”
Polly was looking out to sea, her brown eyes thoughtful, and a bit
sad. She didn’t know why she felt sad, but she did, and only the
Captain seemed to understand why. He had said once over at the
island that a barometer probably had no idea what ailed it, but it
ailed just the same, and Polly’s temperament was just as volatile.
“The other day,” she said, musingly, “the Captain said he had been
tramping the beach one awful night in a thunderstorm, when he was
first on coast duty, and he felt troubled about all the boats that were
in peril. Then all at once he thought of those words, ‘He maketh His
angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire.’ And he felt
strengthened all at once, so he wasn’t afraid any more.”
“How do you do, girls?” called Mrs. Vaughan’s pleasant voice
behind them, and they turned to find her and the Doctor with
Dorothy and Bess. The Doctor was to take dinner at the hotel with
the Commodore’s family, but they all walked back through the pine
grove together to the shore road.
“Wasn’t the sermon nice?” asked Bess, happily. “I love that
parable about the merchant who sought pearls.”
The Doctor nodded his head.
“That simile is one of the finest in the Bible,” he responded. “I had
the good fortune to attend the pearl harvest at Ceylon twice, and it
sets one thinking, it certainly sets one thinking.”
“Oh, tell us about it, please, Doctor?” pleaded Polly, slipping her
hand on his arm. “I’ve been wondering about it ever since we left
the stadium. Are there any pearls around here?”
The Doctor was not a Yankee, but he usually answered one
question by asking another, in Yankee fashion.
“What are you all going to do this afternoon?”
“Rest, and write letters home, and talk. Crullers and Aunty
Welcome will take long naps. Sue and Ted will get out their book of
class songs, and sing and play all of them over five times running.
Isabel will read a book, and Ruth and I will write letters.”
“That’s all right; just as long as you had not planned to go sailing.
About four, Dorothy and Bess and I will come over in the Natica and
talk to you about pearls. I have some unset ones I will show you.”
“Is it true that they lose their luster, and people put them back
into the sea to regain it?” Kate inquired.
“Well, people do it, but I don’t know whether it helps them any. A
pearl merchant will tell you it is better to peel a pearl, but that is not
so romantic, is it? There was one Empress, you know, who sent her
casket of pearls every year to be immersed in the sea. Now, don’t
ask any more questions until this afternoon, then we’ll hold a talk
fest.”
“No, a pearl fest,” Polly suggested. “And we’ll have a driftwood fire
on the beach after dark, and toast marshmallows, and eat hermits.”
“Will you tell me what hermits are?”
 “I had rather leave that to Aunty Welcome, for she makes them,
you know,” laughed Polly.
They caught up with the carry-all on their way back, and walked
beside it on the path next the road. The Captain looked different
without his uniform, all dressed in a suit of sober black, but he was
as rosy and as twinkly-eyed as ever, and he looked over the girls
with a feeling of pride.
“You’re getting to be a credit to the sou’west shore,” he told them.
“Trig and taut as a fleet of clipper-built coasters, be’ant they,
mother? But you keep away from the Point, now mind. There’s a
reef out there that at low tide would rip up a keel like a submarine
mine hitting a Russian man-o’-war. And any sort of a west gale
would blow you straight out on it.”
“But there aren’t any gales,” said Sue.
“Not yet, but wait a bit. We’ll be into August shortly, and then, I
tell you, look out. There’s some quick fellows come a’racing out of
the sou’west that would take your heads off.”
“I wish we could get out into the open sea, though, before we go
home, Captain Carey,” said Polly, wistfully. “We’re only shore sailors.
Couldn’t we go out around the Point some fair day, and reach the
open?”
The Captain put his head a bit on one side, and trailed the
tasseled end of the whip between the colt’s ears. Then he shook his
head.
“You’d better not. That’s the safest way. If you want a good sail
outside the harbor, I’ll take you for one on a top master, forty foot
long, yes, I will. Billy Clewen, the station keeper, has one, and we’ll
sail clear out to Tarker’s Light. How’s that?”
“Beautiful,” the girls cried, and Polly added, “Don’t you forget,
now.”
“Father never forgets anything,” Mrs. Carey spoke up, contentedly,
“excepting his place in the hymn-book, and in the Bible reading for
each Sunday.”
 Then they all had a good laugh at the Captain, who was famous
for losing his place, and would be far ahead or far behind when the
congregation were just moving along easily.
“Avast there, where are you bound?” he would whisper to Nancy,
and nudge her to show him the right place.
“How’s an old fellow to know where they’re going to bring up
next?” he asked, indignantly. “They never hold true to their course,
and they are tacking before I know it, and off they go like a herring
from a hook.”
“I thought they caught herring in nets,” said Crullers.
“They do,” agreed the Captain, heartily. “And that’s why you can’t
make one stay on a hook. They’re the most notional fish I ever saw.
I’ve had one get on a hook, and fairly wink me in the eye, and
wiggle off again.”
“Benjy Carey!” exclaimed Mrs. Carey, “and you a-coming direct
from meeting to tell a yarn like that!”
But the Captain only laughed until he coughed, and Nancy had to
pat him on the back.
That afternoon the yacht club entertained in its own, particular
fashion. Nancy came over, but Tom went down to the station with
his father. Some day he meant to go on duty there too. It was one of
the Captain’s boasts that three generations of Careys had patrolled
that strip of rock-strewn coast, “and there’s another one in the
making,” he always added; so Tom would square his shoulders and
try to look like one of the crew.
The doctor dined at the hotel that day with Commodore Vaughan
and his family, and it was late afternoon before the girls caught sight
of the white motor boat cutting its way across the sparkling waters
of the sunlit bay. The broad veranda looked very cool and restful
that afternoon. Polly and Kate had spread all the available mats and
had carried out the round table from the sitting-room, dropping new
magazines over it invitingly, with a pitcher of fruit lemonade and a
plate of hermits to nibble on.
 “Hermits, do you call these?” asked Bess, as she bit into her third
one. “I never heard of them, but they’re just dandy.”
“Well, there are hermits and hermits,” Polly explained. “But Aunty
Welcome’s are the best we’ve ever had, much better than Annie
May’s at the Hall. How do you make them, Aunty?”
Welcome paused in the kitchen doorway, her hands on her broad
hips, her brown eyes fairly shining with delight at their appreciation
of her cooking.
“I takes some flour, and den I takes some ’lasses, and it has to be
good ’lasses. None ob dis syrupy trash dat just drizzles down. I want
’lasses you can hyar go kerflop when it hits de dish; yas, I do.” She
shook all over with laughter. “Den I takes some cream, den I takes
some spices, and some brown sugar, and some eggs, and I mixes
’em up good. Den I jes’ puts in all de ’vailable fruit I got lying ’round,
raisins, and currants, and citron, and figs, and dates, and nuts, any
ole thing. And den I bakes ’em.”
“And we eat ’em,” concluded Sue, forcibly.
Even the doctor shook with laughter over the recipe.
“But I’m afraid if we tried to make some, Aunty, we’d make a
failure of it,” he said. “And they are certainly fine. Please may I have
some marmalade with mine?”
“Now tell about the pearl harvest,” prompted Ruth, when they
were all fairly settled, and the supply of hermits had diminished
somewhat. “What is it like?”
“How often have you been there?” added Kate.
“Twice. Last year and once when I was a youngster just out of
college, and bent on globe-trotting. Ceylon, you know, is the great
pearl market of the world, and yet the season of the catch lasts only
six weeks. But during those six weeks, instead of a long, jungle-
fringed beach, there rise the tents and houses of the pearl seekers,
like a city of magic. Every morning you can see the long boats go
out, hundreds of them, and each carrying from sixty to seventy
men.”
 “Divers?” asked Polly.
“Not all. Some are rowers, and some take care of the catch as the
divers bring it up. They are all natives, and trained to the work.
When they dive, all they carry down with them is their basket and a
small tortoise shell clip that holds their nostrils closed.”
“Don’t they have to wear diving suits?” asked Ted.
“No. They can stay under water longer than any human beings I
have ever seen. And after the catch of the day is brought in, it is put
up at auction, and then there is excitement enough to satisfy
anyone. I have often wondered why some artist has never put the
scene of the pearl harvest on canvas;” the doctor’s eyes were half
closed, as if he could recall it perfectly even then. “I have seen as
many as five million oysters piled there, waiting to be sold, and to
the crowd it is one great lottery. Any shell in the lot may contain a
pearl worth thousands. So they scramble, and push to get up close
to the auctioneer, and even the children will beg you for pennies so
that they may buy a handful of the shells and have the fun of
opening them. Last year while I stood there, a little old man in front
of me, with a crutch, turned and begged me to lift him up so the
auctioneer would be sure to see him. He was a Burmah merchant
and told me afterwards he was sent every year to buy for the native
princes. Behind me was a tall, quiet Persian. They told me he had
found a pearl once years before that brought him over seventy
thousand dollars. It was a pink one, and flawless. And he had come
every year since and bid on every day’s catch in the hope of finding
its mate.”
“Oh, I’d love to be there,” cried Polly her eyes sparkling with
excitement. “And do they open them right in front of you so you can
see them find the pearls?”
“Some do. And when a pearl of great price is found, even to-day
the bidding jumps like magic over that catch the same as in the old
days of the parable. The merchants will still go and sell all they have
to buy the one pearl if they can get it.”
 “I wonder why it is everybody loves pearls so,” said Ruth
thoughtfully. “I do myself, better than diamonds, or any of the
colored stones. They seem different, almost as if they had life. Were
they ever alive inside the shells, Doctor Smith?”
“Let me see,” mused the doctor. “Are pearls alive? I’ve wondered
that myself. The scientists tell us, though, that a pearl is a disease of
the oyster, and others say it is only a grain of sand that has slipped
inside the shell and irritates the mollusc, so it wraps it about with a
secretion of its own that hardens and, after a while, you have the
pearl. The Chinese open oyster shells and slip inside tiny images of
Buddha, and the oyster covers them with mother-of-pearl.”
“Oh, Polly, don’t you know how we studied last year about the
Malays, and their pearl legend?” exclaimed Ted, eagerly. “They say
at the full of the moon the pearl oyster rises to the surface of the
water and opens its shell, and a dew drop falls into it, and is
crystallized. And they say the pearl is colored by the weather at the
time it was born. If the night is clear, the pearl is perfect, and if it is
cloudy, the pearl will be opalescent and dim, and if there’s a flash of
lightning, the shell shuts up instantly and the pearl will be dwarfed.”
“It makes me think of the Polynesian way of catching pearls,” said
the doctor. “They send out a long boat at sunrise, a canoe, with
some old tribesman playing a weird, plaintive melody on a sort of
flute, to scare away evil spirits. Young girls are chosen to dive for the
shells, generally the fairest and purest in the village and they poise
themselves in the prow of the canoe and dive just as the sun rises.”
“I shall try it to-morrow morning,” said Polly promptly, her eyes
dancing with mischief. “Ted and Sue shall play on their mandolins for
me, and I will dive for pearls.”
“And you dare to call me vain,” teased Isabel. “I guess if anyone is
to dive, I will.”
“Let’s all dive,” suggested Kate, the peacemaker, laughing. “Tell us
some more, please, doctor, and don’t mind these giddy creatures.”
Ruth leaned forward, reflectively, her eyes dreamy and full of
thought.
 “Polly,” she said, “didn’t Mary Stuart love pearls? Didn’t she always
carry a rosary of pearls with her, and didn’t we read some place that
it was found clasped in her hands after she was killed?”
“Here, child, stop talking about such gloomy things,” Ted
interposed, briskly, lifting the tall pitcher of fruit lemonade. “May I
pour you another glass, doctor? It’s delicious. Polly dissolved some
pearl dust in it, and dreamed she was Cleopatra.”
“I never heard sech talk in all my born days, doctah, I never did,”
exclaimed Aunty Welcome, putting her head out rebukingly. “Ain’t
dey a lot ob crazy creeturs, sah?”
“Full of the joy of life, Welcome, full of the springtime,” replied the
doctor, happily. “Let them alone. I can stand it. Give me some more
pearl dust elixir, Miss Edwina.”
“Pearls stand for tears, really and truly,” said Dorothy, seriously.
“I’ve always heard that. The night before the king was killed,
Marguerite of Valois dreamed all her diamonds had turned to pearls,
our history teacher told us.”
“Stop it,” Ted insisted. “Can’t you see how melancholius-like Polly
and Ruth are looking? I shall be afraid, pretty soon, to touch a pearl
with a ten-foot pole, even if I find one in my oyster stew.”
“Don’t mind them, doctor,” said Polly, cheerfully. “The pearl is my
birthstone, and I love it dearly, and you won’t find me weeping
often. See, it’s past sundown now. We’re going to set fire to that pile
of driftwood down on the beach, and toast marshmallows around it,
while the glee club holds forth.”
“Just one minute,” called the doctor, as they rose. “I want you to
look at this.”
The girls gathered around his chair, as he drew a tiny packet from
his pocket, wrapped in tissue paper, and unfolding it disclosed
several unset pearls, large as peas, and rarely beautiful.
“Do you carry them with you like that?” asked Kate.
“Just like that,” replied the doctor, blithely, and he let them roll
about in the palm of his hand. “I bought them at the pearl harvest,
and I like to have them close to me. They say that Napoleon, when
he sat and dreamed of the conquest of the world, loved to feel unset
pearls slip through his fingers. So, why not I?”
“Oh, they are lovely!” Polly touched them lingeringly. “Isn’t it too
bad that such things should be shut up in a shell at the bottom of
the ocean?”
Ruth was calling to them to hurry, for the marshmallows were
waiting to be cooked, and the fire was started, and as they walked
down to the beach the doctor quoted:
“‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark,
unfathomed caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its
sweetness on the desert air.’”
“I think those pearls in your pocket are just as hidden and wasted,
doctor,” said Sue, deliberately, “as if they were in a dark, unfathomed
cave.”
“Do you? Well, it was kind of you not to say as if they were cast
before swine,” laughed the doctor.
“One of Sue’s charms is her engaging frankness,” put in Kate.
“I forgive her, for it’s in a good cause. And some day, if I find
anyone who will love and cherish them more than I do, I may give
up one.”
 “First Batch of Marshmallows Ready!” Called Ruth

“First batch of marshmallows ready,” called Ruth, and the pearl

fest was over.
 CHAPTER XVI

THE CAPTAIN’S PARTY

“Do you girls realize that it is the first week in August?”

It was about a week after the doctor’s talk, and they had just
come up to the porch after a dip in the bay.
“Let’s stay down in the sand, and dry off,” Ted suggested. “It’s
early yet.”
So down they trailed again, and sat on the sand. One special
charm of belonging to this yacht club was that you could do just
what you wanted when you wanted. As Polly said, it took all the fun
out of anything when you had to wait for it.
“Poor old King Solomon,” she would say, “I don’t know what it was
he longed for, but I am sure he never got it, because he said so
mournfully, ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’ And I know just
how he felt when he said it.”
“I ought to mend my jacket,” said Sue, easily. “But there’s plenty
of time.”
“That’s what Sue always says,” Kate declared. “I think her motto
and Ted’s should be ‘There’s plenty of time.’”
“Well, there isn’t,” Polly remarked, as she sat down on a sand
dune, and rested her chin on her hands, with her hair falling around
her like a meditative mermaid. “The regatta is the fifteenth, and
we’ve got to have our boats all spick and span for the race.”
“You’re not really going to race for the Junior cup, are you, Polly?”
Isabel’s tone was very discouraging.
 “I am.” Polly smiled at the big white club house across the bay
quite as if she expected it to nod back at her. “The Tidy Jane is just
as fine a catboat as there is on the bay, and so are all our boats.
Nancy’s going to race the Pirate, Tom’s knockabout, and the other
afternoon when we sailed to the inlet and back, I had the best of
her all the way. Of course I shall race.”
“Is there a prize?” asked Crullers, the practical. The girls all broke
into a peal of laughter, and Ruth declared that Crullers never could
see anything in empty glory. There had to be a tangible goal for her
to exert herself.
“There’s a silver cup for the big boats to race for,” Polly replied.
“Commodore Vaughan’s sloop, Adventure, has held it for sixty-
footers for three years, they say. And there’s a smaller cup for
twenty-footers and under. We’d come under that head.”
“What will you use it for, Polly, after you win it?” asked Sue,
innocently, and Polly promptly threw sand at her, till she cried
quarter.
“Whether I win it or not, it’s the sport of the thing that counts,”
she said. “I never saw a race in all my life that I didn’t wish I was in
it, just for the chance of winning. It isn’t the prize so much, it’s the
honor of the thing, and the sport.”
“I know, Polly, that’s perfectly right,” rejoined Kate, approvingly.
“What if no one ever entered a race for fear they might not win;
there’d be no racing at all.”
“Well, if you intend entering, I shall too,” said Sue. “For I know
that the Patsy D. can outsail anything on this bay if she once ‘gets
a’going,’ as the Captain says. The trouble is, she won’t ‘get a’going’
until she has a mind to. I can’t seem to make her grab hold of a
breeze and pull.”
“You don’t let go your main sheet right,” Polly told her. “You hoist
your sail, and let it wobble before you let the boom swing about,
and catch the wind into the sail right. Makes me think of a story the
Captain told about one of the summer cottagers last year, who went
out with Tom and him one day. There was a big sea on, and when a
puff of wind caught her, the Captain called out, ‘Let go that jib, let
go that jib’. And the guest was really angry and indignant. ‘Who’s
touching your old jib, I should like to know,’ he said, huffily. The
Captain just shook when he told it.”
Ruth sat up suddenly, and put back her hair from her face.
“I just saw a boat put off from the Orienta dock,” she said. “It
looks like the Nixie. Bess is at the tiller. I wonder what they can
want. They’re making for here.”
It took hardly ten minutes to cross the bay at its narrow end, with
a good wind to help, and before the girls had time to run up to the
cottage and dress, the Nixie was at the landing, with reefed sails.
“Mamma sent us over,” Dorothy exclaimed, as soon as she stepped
ashore. “The Portland brought a consignment of fruit for the club
last night, and papa sends you over a basket of it with his
compliments.”
The girls bore the heavy basket up to the porch and promptly
explored its contents. There was a large watermelon, some
canteloupes, peaches and pears, and a box of stuffed dates.
“Mamma put those in because she says she knows what girls like,”
said Bess, perching herself on the porch railing contentedly. “And
what do you think? We’ve teased and begged to be allowed to come
over here with you for regatta week, and now we may if you will let
us. You can get a better view of the bay from this porch than you
can from the club.”
“Well, young lady, you’ll get your view of the race from the stern
locker of the Nixie,” said Dorothy, firmly. “Polly won’t allow us in the
club unless we agree to race for the glory of it, will you?”
“No, ma’am,” returned Polly, serenely, as she knelt down, and
spread out several newspapers.
“What are you going to do, Polly?” asked Isabel, who believed
firmly in the fitness of things. “Oh, don’t cut into the melon out here,
dear. Put it on the ice, and let it cool.”
 “Put it on the ice!” Polly repeated, with fine scorn. “Listen to her,
girls. You’d think we had a whole refrigerator handy. Dorothy, all the
ice we own is wrapped up in Ruth’s old waterproof cape, in a tub
down in the cellar. It’s about the size of a pincushion, and if I were
to set this watermelon on it, it would just evaporate. We will eat the
melon now to save it.”
“It’s plenty cold,” Dorothy helped lift the melon down on the
papers. “But, Polly, will it be all right if we come over and stay for
regatta week?”
“It will, and we’ll be ever and ever so glad to have you. It’s very
stylish, Isabel, to entertain guests during a regatta week. Will you
please bring along your own blankets, as we haven’t enough to go
’round.”
“Indeed, we will,” Dorothy cried, happily, “and I’m so pleased.
Mamma always is busy regatta week, and so is papa, and Bess and I
just have to look after ourselves. She’s going on the Adventure too
for the race. Oh, Polly, it’s splendid to watch them. Last year, at the
finish, the Adventure and Mermaid were right together, and we all
stood up on chairs, and waved flags at them, and shouted as they
came down the last stretch with every inch of canvas crowded on.”
Polly was very busy carving the watermelon in fancy fashion, so
that when it fell apart, it looked like a huge, red-hearted lily.
“Makes it taste better,” she said, judiciously. “Who won last year,
Dorothy?”
“Oh, the Adventure, of course. Right at the very last they crowded
on another reef—what do you call that little bit of a sail way up top
on a sloop, Polly?”
Polly shook her head.
“T’gallant something, isn’t it? That’s what the Captain calls my
eyebrows. Tarry top lights, and t’gallant eyebrows, so it must mean
something way high up.”
“Probably,” Dorothy agreed. “Anyway, they let out another reef,
and the Adventure just slipped by the Mermaid like a bit of down.
Papa’s boat’s a sloop. It seems to me it’s all sails. It looks like a great
gull with outspread wings when it’s going full tilt out to sea.”
“You must always speak of a ship as she or her,” corrected Bess.
“Papa called you a sandpiper for that, Dolly.”
“I don’t care,” Dorothy laughed. “I want to tell the girls about it.
There are six staterooms on it, and when the season closes up here
at Eagle Bay, we sail south to Boston, and then home. Bess and I go
to boarding-school.”
Just then Tom appeared around the west shore, holding down the
Pirate, while he called,
“Want anything over to Eastport?”
“Yes. Mail, potatoes and soap,” called back Polly, with a smile and
wave of her hand; then to Dorothy, as if no interruption had
occurred, “We’re going out with the Captain for a sail around the
Point Light, and down to Tarker’s Light. He said he’d take us if we
behaved for a week, and we have. Haven’t been out once in a bad
wind, haven’t made any trouble at all, so now we’re going. Why
can’t you and Bess stay and have dinner with us, though? We won’t
start before two, and Aunty’s making clam pie, Maryland style, and
baked, stuffed tomatoes, and peach dumplings.”
“Oh, we’ll stay fast enough,” cried Bess, while Dorothy just smiled.
“You do have the best things to eat over here that I know anything
about. Papa says he’s coming over some day just to sample them,
and find out if it’s really true. Doctor Smith says it is; so papa can’t
really tell us out and out that we are coloring it up a little.”
“Tell him we’d be delighted to entertain him any time, and Mrs.
Vaughan, too,” exclaimed Polly, with true Southern hospitality. “We’ll
have fried sweet potatoes, and fried chicken, and corn fritters, and
corn pone, all from Aunty Welcome’s special recipes. She’ll be so
proud to get up a dinner and we’d love to have you.”
“Where’s Isabel?” asked Sue suddenly. “Did she go up to dress?”
“No, I’m up here in the hammock. I don’t want to get all freckled
in that sunlight,” came Isabel’s tones from the shadiest corner of the
porch.
 “Pull her forth, girls,” ordered Polly, gaily. “She’s too exclusive. She
just wants to set herself up before us as a mirror of style, and we
won’t have it. Pull her forth, and walk her in the sun till she’s as
freckled as a cowslip. What do you think, Dorothy, this young person
wants to wear a bathing cap with a bow on the front and a ruffle
around it like an old maid’s nightcap, and she takes a bar of violet
scented soap with her into the deep blue sea when she trips down
to bathe. It once dropped like a stone down to the bottom, and she
never got it.”
“‘Though lost to sight, to memory dear,’” quoted Sue; she linked
arms with Ted and sang the refrain over and over with variations,
until Isabel put her fingers in her ears and ran for the house.
Suddenly the majestic form of Aunty Welcome appeared on the
porch, and waved a dish towel at them.
“Ain’t dey nobody at all going to eat clam pie?” she called. “If you
all don’t look like a mess ob turtles burrowing in de sand, den I miss
my guess. And every one eating watermelon. Well, for de love ob
cats! Miss Polly, don’t you know you’s going ter be so freckled dat
you can’t find de jining places? You come on up out ob dat sand
now, you hyar me?”
“Yes’m,” said Polly, meekly, and the rest trailed after her, for Aunty
Welcome’s word was law on Lost Island.
After dinner the Vaughan girls had to return, but the others
dressed and sat out on the steps, awaiting the Captain’s coming.
The everyday suits of blue duck had been discarded, and they had
dressed in festal array to honor the Captain. They were all in their
best yachting suits of white duck, trimmed in dark blue, with dark
blue reefer jackets, and caps to match. But before the trip was over,
when the seas had swashed up merrily over the sloop, as she keeled
over to the lee-shore, they wished they had worn the blue duck.
“What boat will he bring that can carry all of us?” asked Sue.
“Tom said the sloop,” answered Polly, as she sat up on the railing,
and re-tied Crullers’ hair bows into a semblance of neatness and
taste. “It belongs to the lighthouse keeper at the Point, but the
Captain can borrow it whenever he wants, and it’s a sea-going craft.”
“Is it, indeed?” giggled Sue. “Girls, do you notice how Commodore
Polly tosses around nautical phrases real careless-like nowadays?”
There hove into sight around the Knob, just then, the Captain and
his sloop. Nancy and Tom were aboard too, and acting as able
seamen.
“Polly, I’ll get your soap and potatoes and mail to-night,” shouted
Tom, as they came within hail. “I saw Billy Clewen over at the Inlet
with his tender, and I hopped in so as to meet father at the Point,
and come on down.”
“That’s all right,” Polly responded. “Oh, girls, isn’t she handsome,”
as they watched the sloop under the Captain’s handling. Steadily,
easily, without any apparent fuss or bother, he brought her about,
reefed her sails, and left her standing, as Tom said, quiet as a lamb,
without a halter on.
“Who puts a halter on a lamb anyway, Tom?” teased Nancy.
“Besides, the Lucy C. has a halter on. Didn’t you see me just drop it
overboard? We can’t bring her up to the landing, Polly. She draws
nine feet—”
“Seven,” corrected the Captain, as he smoked comfortably on his
pet pipe, an old briarwood whose bowl was all charred from long
usage. “And ten-foot beam.”
“How can we get aboard, then?” asked Polly.
“I’m coming after you in the ‘dink,’” Tom answered.
“Well, my land! If I ever see sech a top-heavy, lopsided thing,”
murmured Aunty Welcome. “Is you all going to trust your precious
lives out in mid ocean in sech a contrivance?”
“Don’t you fret one bit, not when we’re with Captain Carey,” Polly
laughed as she waved her hand. The last girl stepped aboard, and
the sails were hoisted. After the little spreads of canvas on their own
boats, it seemed to the girls as if the sails of the Lucy C. were
gigantic, but Tom and his father managed them trimly, and as the
wind filled them, they struck out across the bay with a tilt to leeward
that was delightful.
“Captain, do I walk with the right sort of roll?” asked Ted, her
hands deep in her reefer pockets, her cap on the back of her red
curls, as she stepped boldly out on the slanting deck. But the sloop
dipped to a wave, and came up with a lurch, and Ted sat down with
startling suddenness.
“Well, not quite,” the Captain answered from the wheel, his blue
eyes twinkling. “You’d better get acquainted with her first. Now, you
can’t get up and do a grand march along the deck of a driving sloop.
It’s against all human nature and boat nature. You’ve got to sit tight,
and mind the sloop, and follow her moods, and get ahead of them
too. A sloop has got more moods than any boat I know of. A yawl is
sort of divided in her ways, like a widow after her second husband.
She’s got one before, and one behind, so to speak, and it steadies
her a bit, but a sloop’s sails act in close sympathy, and when one of
them starts acting kittenish, the rest follow suit.”
“How large is this one, Captain?” asked Ruth, holding to her cap,
as the wind blew freshly around her.
“About forty foot, more or less. Her draught’s seven foot.”
“Why here we are to the channel already,” Polly sang out, as they
slipped past Smugglers’ Cove, and could see the view out to sea
around the Point. The doctor was sitting down on the landing
fishing; fishing tranquilly, in his own way. There were lines hanging
all around him, fastened to the planks with an invention of his own,
by which a little bell rang every time a fish took the bait. Placidly he
sat there, his hat tilted forward to shield his eyes, and a pile of
magazines beside him betraying his real occupation. The girls called
and called to him; at last he looked up and waved to them.
As they rounded the Point the wind freshened considerably. It was
glorious to sail with the sharp bow cutting the water like a knife, and
throwing up great clouds of spray that drenched the girls like an
April shower as the head wind threw it back on them. Overhead the
canvas tugged until the rigging sang a tune all its own.
 Ted and Sue were singing at the tops of their voices, arms linked
closely, backed up against what Crullers called “the high side of her.”
The others joined in the choruses, except Polly, who stood beside
the Captain at the wheel. There was a look in her dark eyes that
matched his own, as she half closed them in the face of the wind, a
look out at the open sea they both loved well. Once the Captain
turned his head, and smiled down at her, as if to let her know he
understood her feelings exactly, and he let her help with the jib
several times, while he and Tom managed the main sail, and Nancy
held her steady on her course at the little pilot wheel.
“It’s ever so much rougher out here than it is in the bay, isn’t it?”
Isabel called faintly, but the wind drowned her voice, and she sat
huddled up on a locker with her coat turned up around her ears, for
all the world like a ship’s cat in a storm, Tom said.
Tarker’s Light was about five miles down the west shore towards
Portland. The seas were longer and heavier than those on the bay,
but the sloop rode them easily, and only shipped one big green
fellow, as the Captain tacked south of the Light, and cut across back
towards home. It splashed up over the deck house, and caught
Isabel and the rest fairly, until they shrieked. Polly and Nancy
escaped, for they were with the Captain, and they rounded the big
bell buoy out in mid channel that clanked a warning note as if it had
a cold in its head, Sue said.
It was after five when they came up to the Life Saving Station on
the Point, and stood by handsomely while Billy Clewen, the keeper,
came out in a dory and took off the girls.
“I’m thinking that I’ll send you home by the shore road, with Tom
and a lantern,” said the Captain, as they walked up the beach
towards the low wooden buildings that nestled among the great
hummocks of sand at the Point. “I’m on the eight to twelve watch
to-night, and I can walk a ways with you myself, but the wind’s
dropped down with the sun, and there’ll hardly be a puff to carry
you back by water.”
 “How lonesome it looks out here,” said Polly, standing on one of
the sand dunes, and gazing around her. The Point of the Sickle came
down to what Tom called a mere “spit of sand.” There were few
rocks out there, except for the reef that lay east of the channel,
towards the east shore. On the Point there was just a long, low
stretch of sand, with great circling combers flowing in ceaselessly,
breaking one above another on the long, shallow shingle. Dark
green they were underneath, then lighter, and lighter, as the sunlight
shot them through with rainbow hues, and last of all the curling
plumes of spray tossed on their crests.
“Isn’t it all pretty,” cried Ruth, her cheeks turning pink as she ran
to Polly’s side. “Don’t you know some place in Kipling where he tells
about the white horses of the sea? Oh, Polly, I love it all so. I never
saw the real ocean before. I mean to stand on a shore, and look out
and out and out on just waves, and know that there’s no land for a
thousand miles.”
“Farther than that,” said Polly. “I think it’s beautiful.”
“So it is, so it is, now,” agreed the Captain, “but ’tain’t so pretty in
the winter, when the ice piles up, and the sleet beats you half down
to the ground, when you try to fight your way in its face.”
“Do you have to patrol all night long on the beach?” Polly asked,
in her earnest, compassionate way.
“Well, no. We take it in watches. One watch leaves about sunset,
and they travel two miles to the half-way house over yonder, and
they meet the next watch, and so it goes through the night.”
“What’s the name of that queer light they carry around their
necks?” asked Crullers. “It explodes, I think.”
“That’s the Coston light,” said the Captain. “I’ll show you some
when we get inside the station. We don’t use them unless there’s a
ship in danger at night. It’s to let the crew know they have been
seen and help will be sent. There’s a spring you tap, and a
percussion cap explodes that sets fire to the red light. Last spring,
along the first of April, we got the tail end of a gale that had traveled
all along the coast, and still had spunk enough to run a schooner on
the reef yonder. We saw her beating her way down about sunset.
Lumber boat she was, bound for Boston. I says then to Billy Clewen
over at the Light that she’d never get by the Point. So we was
looking out for her, but the crew were all Gloucester boys, and they
wouldn’t give up till she’d struck fair and square.”
“Then what?” Polly’s dark, straight brows drew together anxiously.
She looked out at the reef that showed its teeth about the incoming
tide.
“We lost two of them,” said the Captain. “They was brothers, poor
laddies. They came ashore two and a half miles below here. But we
took off the rest.”
“Oh, I think it’s terrible, all the wrecks there are,” exclaimed Ruth,
tensely. “Death seems so useless when it’s an accident.”
“Well, I’m thinking there ain’t anything that happens under the
sun you can call useless,” rejoined the old sailor, placidly.
Polly began to sing, her voice rising clear and high on the breeze
that blew up from the west, as the sun went down.
“Three fishers went sailing out into the west,
Out into the west as the sun went down,
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the town.
For men must work and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.”
“Oh, Polly, don’t, please,” cried Ruth and Isabel together. “It
makes the cold chills run down your back.”
“Well, now, I never feel that way about it,” said the Captain,
contentedly. “Our times are in His hands, do you mind? Our times
are in His hands. Don’t you ever forget that. When I was a
youngster like you girls and Tom here, I used to reason along those
lines too, and I’d be hoping I’d die this way and that way, and I’d be
wishing for a chariot and some angels. Well, now it rests me to feel
that I’m going to tread the same gangway as the rest, and my