"I must, Monyah. It's going to be a big storm, a grand one. And who knows, I may never see another one like this. Good-night, dear."

She coaxed and begged that he would not go, but she could not change his purpose. Twice he kissed her, twice he said good-night. Then she heard the thump of his sea-boots as he went down the stairs and out on the veranda.

For a time she could hear him pacing back and forth, but soon even this slight comfort was lost to her. The northeaster let itself loose. On the closed shutters the gale-driven rain was beating out the long roll of the storm's muster call. Against the stone embankment on the Bay front she could hear the waves dashing, and from the outer beach, four miles away, came the deep-toned thunder of great breakers.

Just how he went about it the Bay folks have never fully agreed. The only witnesses were the lightkeeper and his assistant, who, under the shadow of the hood, happened to be watching the yeasty cauldron of the Inlet just as a schooner, the loosened peak of her foresail, like a madman's arm, waving a crazy salute, and her leeward deck buried to the cabin windows, drove seaward through the great rollers. Lashed to the wheel was a tall, erect figure in oilskins.

"The glasses, Jim!" shouted the lightkeeper. And when he had stared through the binoculars for a moment, "Great God, man! It's old Cap'n Dory Ibbens in the Betsy Belle! Look!"

Somewhere near midnight, this is the accepted theory, when the northeaster was at its worst, he had rowed out to the old schooner, dropped the peak of her riding-sail, let the anchor cable go by

the run, trimmed in the sheet, and put out close hauled almost into the very teeth of the gale. How far he reached out to sea no one can say, but it is evident that he kept the light in view. Probably off Sunken Rocks, where they catch the big blues, he came about and squared away for the beach.

That the old hulk should have held together as she boiled home before that sixty-mile-an-hour snorter was a miracle. Skid Everett, the Coast Guard who first sighted her, said that at times, when the wind ballooned her sail up and out, it almost seemed to lift her clear of the water, and the next minute it would jam her down until he thought she had gone to the bottom all standing.

They fired rockets, burned all their Coston lights, to no effect. Still the schooner raced shorewards, straight for the North Point, where old Neptune's white horses charged up on the beach until they almost leaped into the Bay beyond. When she finally did strike the shoal it was with a bang that snapped her rotten stays as if they had been so much thread, sent both her sticks crashing over her bows, and split her hull into a dozen pieces.

Thus did Captain Dory Ibbens enter that vast, uncharted sea of the world beyond, a roaring northeaster piping his triumphant requiem, the whole Atlantic for a winding sheet.

IN American eyes the scenery of England looks over-trim and opulent, and of all the garden-country the tourist finds nothing more "handsome and genteel," as Swift says, than the upper Thames. But this is because the wayfarer upon those waters turns his eyes too much to one side of the stream. Forests are there by intervals, but there also are the gardens of villas, their little embankments, their steps, their painted boathouses, their scarlet umbrellas, edges of lawns clean cut by the gardener's knife, hardly so much as a water-rat really wild. Let him look on the other bank, and he will find a much simpler England, an ancient country of the hind and the teamster, a lowly England smelling of hay and cowslips, facing, at these close quarters, the England that smells of tea-roses. For over against the garden walk is the tow-path; and the walk winds and loiters, the tow-path trudges. There the cattle graze, and there the horses labor with the heavy barges far behind. Even away from this fragrant country of the upper river, the tow-path is a primitive thing and a sign of the simplest labor. The canal that passes through a part of London, to debouch into the Thames below bridge, has also its tow-path; and on that ambiguous shore, too, it looks honest and ancient, and un-Londonlike under the very gasworks-man or horse slanting slowly under the rope, and the flat black barge coming. If there is so much as a blade of wild grass making a little local spring or summer upon that blackened bank, between the ashes and the dust, it grows by the tow-path, and it is wild, veritably wild, and has more of the spirit of authentic country than has the emerald-green grass of Hyde Park.

Have the rivers of America tow-paths? Have Abana and Pharpar this little grace

of our narrow Jordan? They have remoter beauties; but without the tow-path this Thames would be another river, and when steam barges go upstream, and there are no more horses, it will be another river. Meanwhile it is the tow-path that keeps the Thames always open to the sun. The gardener's scissors ply on their own bank, but the tow-path bank has been preserved, all these centuries, free of trees, inclosures, or too tall flowers. For even here the rushes and reeds know their place; they stand in slender rank, a step below the bank, where their height will incommode nobody, much like some wild poor people permitted to abide between the roadway and the curb, in a thin line, to see a jubilee go by; they stand at the passage of the jubilee of waters. Here harbor little living creatures of the more secret kind. The gallant swimming of the vole is an every-day show; and because one day we were keeping very still by the root of a willow to watch the dragon-fly with its four bronze wings, a wavy snake landed near. It was a wild surprise, to our ignorance, to see a serpent swim; and this undulant creature carried its little head clear out of water and came across the Thames, closing its journey so near our boat as to show us the eyes of color upon its flexible side. When, in the evening, we told a lifelong resident about the swimming snake, she said, "Perhaps it was a heel.” We told her that eels kept their heads under water. In the thickets of rushes, besides, dwell all kinds of water-birds; the dabchicks nest there in the season; so the son of the Thames resident told us. His appreciations of the river-life seemed to be rather destructive. He was an extremely small boy of eleven, who looked no more than seven years old; but he had an earnest manner. "There used," he

ringer of an ancient riverside church, who came out between the two periods of bell-ringing and asked the stranger to go in and look at the altar-plate, solid gold, presented by Such-an-one, son of King William the Fourth; and the old man looked for a moment with a respectfully confidential glance, dropping his voice as he mentioned the sinister lineage. He led his captive visitor up to the altar, and insisted that every piece of the golden ware should be lifted and looked at. "There's not a set like it," he said, turning back for yet another view, as he led us out again. The church had been restored in such a year, he told us; and when, seeing two thirteenth-century tombs, we asked what had been its date of building, he replied that "it had n't got no date,”

a baffling reply, to which there was no effectual rejoinder. Next to the gold service he was eager to show a little modern window with a design of lilies, dedicated to the memory of a woman. "She was drowned," said the old man. "Before this argan was put up, I used to play the bar'l argan here, I did. And she used to stand up by me and sing, something splendid, she did. I'm a cripple, I am; I was born a cripple, but I was always kind. Always kind, I was, and she used to stand up and sing, she did, something splendid."

But I have strayed from the tow-path, and hasten to tread again that serviceable road. It lets the sun in upon the Thames, I said; for the tow-rope must have plain and unencumbered banks, whether it draw tons of timber or only a little boat, and the boat be towed by a woman.

A quite childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must

have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith I girt my shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but useful, on the even path of the lopped and grassy side of the river, the side of meadows. The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain," only too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of the Thames-side plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, are swept aside like a long breaker of flourishing green. The line drums lightly in the ear when the bushes are high and it grows taut; it makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of easy power.

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of "feeling hearts' hearts" according to the entirely erroneous sentiment of a verse of Tom Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys of sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy laborers with the oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, on the long tow - path, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, I need not save to walk in my swinging harness, and so take my friends upstream.

I work merely as the mill-stream works, by simple movement. At lock after lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to the wheel that turns by no greater stress, and I and the river have the same mere force of progress. There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the bright Thames walking softly in my blood, or I that am flowing by so many curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now I am over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the wheeling river makes the sky wheel about my head and swings the lighted clouds or the blue to face my eyes. The birds, flying high for mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. I will not envy them that liberty. Did not Wordsworth want a "little boat" for the air?

Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor? Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing. All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Even the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than I, walking an effectual walk with the line attached to the willing steps. The moderate strength of a mere every-day physical education gives sufficient mastery of the tow-path. If the natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it life; and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyant burden the yielding check - than ever before. An unharnessed walk begins to seem a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It is easier than towing? So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to the arms than the drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart.

To walk unbound is to move in prose, without the friction of the wings of metre, without the encouraging tug upon the spirit and the line. No dead weight follows me as I tow. Mine is not the work of a ploughing ox or of a draught-horse. There is no lifeless stopping of the burden if I pause, but a soft, continuing impetus, so that I am all but overtaken by the boat if the latches of the gates in the pastures are long to lift, or if a company of cows are slow to move from that extreme brink which is mine by necessity. The burden is willing; it depends upon me gayly, as a friend may do, without making any depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set me at naught, or charge me with a make-believe. It accompanies, it almost anticipates; it pulls when I am brisk, just so much as to give briskness good reason, and to justify me if I should take to still more nimble heels. All my haste, moreover, does but waken a more brilliantly sounding ripple.

The bounding and rebounding burden I carry (it nearly seems to carry me, so fine is the mutual good-will) gives work to the figure, enlists erectness and gait, but leaves the eyes free. No watching

of mechanisms for the laborer of the towpath. What little outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer, smoothly towed. The easy and efficient work lets me carry my head high and watch the birds, or listen to them. They fly in such lofty air that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of their flight shows silver for a moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons. The days are so still that I do not merely hear the cawing of the rooks, I overhear their hundred private croakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by wings.

What idle afternoon on the opposite bank, what "tea and comfortable advice in an arbour," as Keats says, were worth these few miles of the country people's side of the Thames? I will keep the tow-path even when the region of villas is left far behind, when the opposite margin bears not gardens, but woods and willows. For even then there is a sense of property in land altogether out of place; whereas the tow-path side is more the nation's. Its wild flowers are, like the cottage flowers in Wordsworth's sonnet, "sacred to the poor." This bank is never tired of a small pink flower that grows in multitudes, sprinkled on green bushes. A hundred miles and more of the little, open, pastured bank that carries the towpath, carry also this little but innumerable flower, mixed with the long purples that wear the color dear to young Autumn.

Monotonous in its constancy to the simple flower of the month, this tow-path garden has the wild variety of its mingled seed-time and flower-time. Not here, as in the house-garden, are the flowers timed for the month and collected for their date, and not here are the ashes and the seeds swept away with their little history of months. The bank is dim with seeds not yet on the wing; the air will carry them full-fledged. Bird, butterfly, and the seed that resembles a star go abroad on the brilliant winds; and the seed is like the poplar for moving when

the air is all but asleep. The other trees have no secret winds. When they wave they tell us what we knew well enough; and there is something less than summerlike in the day that swings the beeches by the tops, and makes even the elm stand tumultuously in the wild steadfastness of its dark leaves. But when the large willows have not a leaf astir, and yet the poplar has the perpetual thrill of its most delicate vigilance, you are indeed rowing in a peaceful day. Peace is the proper effect of summer, and the poplar does not break that calm by his tender wakefulness. The willow gives tidings of a breeze, the poplar does but mark that the stillness is alive. His excess of mobility makes him a gentle friend. He has a lofty place wherefrom to watch our day, with signals of lights that tremble yet never pass.

It is not only the land that flowers. The water has its hour for blossoming. As the remote constellations open and rise at their time of year, the constellations that are not tethered close to the pole-star, so do a multitude of waterflowers remote from the familiar series of the fields. They come up to bud and open in the air, taking their share of the upper world, fresh from their shades. They are the "daughters of Hades," and have their "day." Few are the waterplants that do not come up once a year to breathe by flowers under blue sky. Something lusty and green, squat and full, that grows low, much like a sort of water-cabbage, seems to be the only plant that remains in the massive water below, and if it flower at all, flowers deep within the floods. But all the rest make a season's growth of the long stalk, slanting downstream until it shall come to the sun, and put out one brief blossom. Every one knows the water-lily, - the large white chalice, a design for fine metal-work, with its centre of a great color that is not fiery or golden, but only the pure yellow of flowers, at its richest and fullest; and every one knows its leaf, which is the flattest thing under that sky to which it is so

absolutely open. On the flat of the world, on the level of the seas, flatter than the calm water which ripples to the oar, is this green leaf. Familiar, moreover, is the little yellow lily, round and as yellow as a celandine, and quite unlike in color to the soft and splendid centre of the largepointed and argent flower.

The river blossoms at the summits of many stems besides those of white and yellow lilies. It flowers, indeed, with a greater effect of life at the top of a stem that bears a little cone of small white river-roses, whiter and brighter than the blackberry-flower, yet otherwise like it, although it grows from a rich water-stem and not from thorns. The lilies flower as soon as they reach the winds and the beams of the world, and they rest blooming on the waters, cheek to cheek, after their long growth; but these little flowers have a spring and strength that carry them up where they can see the fields, erect, free of the water, bathed in air, with a stiff vitality. They break off short if you gather them, like hyacinths. Low in a Canadian canoe should your seat be, so that you may have the frosty, cold, green rushes high against the sky, and the soft winter-color of the water carrying its little round roses in the sun, with their shadows upon the mid-stream leaves.

During half the day there is a slight haze of heat over the hills, — steep pasture hills, hills profoundly wooded, and hills at the point of harvest, and, indeed, throughout the horizon; and the sunshine is white. But for the freshness of aspens and poplars — runnels and brooks of trees, freshets and breezes of leaves-there would be a touch of dreariness about so much uncolored sunshine, so many green willows and dark green elms, and so many fields. It is the flame and not the glow of day, as when a fire is newly alight; and except that, happily, there is no town to speak of within reach of a breeze or of reasonable suspicion, you would almost say that with the flame of day there was a trail of the smoke of flames. But it is not smoke. The August