liver for them. But it's all spoiled now. I will never undertake to do good again, with a lot of boys in the way, as long as I live; so there!" Lily turned about.

Going to tell your mother!" said Johnny, with scorn which veiled anxiety.

"No, I'm not. I don't tell tales." Lily marched off, and in her wake went Johnny and Arnold, two poor little disillusioned would-be knights of old roinance in a wretchedly commonplace future, not far enough from their horizons for any glamour.

They went home, and of the three Johnny Trumbull was the only one who was discovered. For him his aunt Janet lay in wait and forced a confession. She listened grimly, but her eyes twinkled.

"You have learned to fight, John Trumbull," said she, when he had finished. "Now the very next thing you have to learn, and make yourself worthy of your grandfather Trumbull, is not to be a fool."

"Yes, Aunt Janet," said Johnny. The next noon, when he came home from school, old Maria, who had been with the family ever since he could re

member and long before, called him into the kitchen. There, greedily lapping milk from a saucer, were two very lean, tall kittens.

"See those nice little tommy-cats," said Maria, beaming upon Johnny, whom she loved and whom she sometimes fancied deprived of boyish joys. "Your aunt Janet sent me over to the Simmonses' for them this morning. They are overrun with cats-such poor, shiftless folks always be-and you can have them. We shall have to watch for a little while till they get wonted, so they won't run home."

Johnny gazed at the kittens, fast distending with the new milk, and felt presumably much as dear Robin Hood may have felt after one of his successful raids in the fair, poetic past.

"Pretty, ain't they?" said Maria. "They have drank up a whole saucer of milk. 'Most starved, I s'pose."

Johnny gathered up the two forlorn kittens and sat down in a kitchen chair, with one on each shoulder, hard, boyish cheeks pressed against furry, purring sides, and the little fighting Cock of the Walk felt his heart glad and tender with the love of the strong for the weak.

VERY

E

In

great trade route of the world has, in season, some peculiar danger to navigation which brings disaster to vessels plying its lanes. the North Atlantic, for ships bound east and west over the busy northern route, the particular menace is Cape Race. In this neighborhood there is an extraordinary conjunction of perils. Fog, icebergs, submerged rocks, northeasterly gales, a sheer shore, and a singularly treacherous current create a large possibility of catastrophe. Cape Race is a bluff, jagged bit of coast, scarcely provided with strand; and a multitude of submerged rocks are scattered from the breaking water at the foot of the cliffs as far to sea as the Virgin Rocks, which outlie ninety miles. The Polar current, which " runs like a river" past the gray cape, is so variable in the direction of its flow that it may race southwest at one time and flow northeast at another. In the spring and early summer-and often as late as the fall of the year-icebergs come down with the current, and lie sluggishly off the coast, hidden from the sharpest eyes of ships' lookouts in the dense accumulations of fog.

It is the fog-almost continuously raised by the contact of the Polar current with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream-which for centuries has made a menace of this cape of evil name. There is little relief from it; it is so continuously present, indeed, that the cape fog-horn is frequently blown for hundreds of hours at a stretch.

""Tis nothing but fog here," said the keeper of the light. "Sure, sir, the dogs bark when the sun comes out!"

And he meant it.

Graves by the wayside-weathered crosses on the heads above the sea-tell their own tales of disaster; and the cottages which huddle in the sheltered coves, and the singular furnishings within, betray the dangerous character

of the coast. Most of the cottage doors once saw service at sea. They do very well ashore, albeit a trifle low for tall men. A skylight may do well enough for a window; and ships' ventilators and the stout planks of ships' decks are not to be despised by the builders of dwellings ashore. Almost every habitation of the cape is comfortably provided with a ship's settee; and most of the hospitable tables are set with ships' china, some of this dating back to the wreck of one or another unlucky vessel of the European and American Steam Packet Company, which must have gone ashore in the fifties, at the latest. Ships' pewter is serviceable; ships' decanters and glasses are as good as any other; ships' sideboards de very well for the display of it all. Ships' medicine-chests contain valuable remedies, if one but have both the knowledge and the courage to use them. Coal from the bunkers of a stranded steamer burns brightly in a stove; of a dark night, when the wind is high and cold, the light falling from cabin lamps gives a snug comfort to a fisherman's cottage; and a wee nip from a captain's bottle, however long it may have lain under water, completes the joy of the oecasion. By means of a ship's capstan boats may be hauled from the surf quite as smoothly as anchors may be lifted from the bottom of the sea; and a ship's bell used aforetime to call the watch some forgotten old wind-jammermay guide bewildered fishermen from a thickening fog to the security of his own familiar harbor.

on

The route of the transatlantic lines from American ports runs past, a hundred miles to sea; but the slow-going tramp, to save a day's steaming, follows the shorter route, and seeks to pass within flag-signaling distance of the cape. Added to the great fleet of tramps which must venture near are the Canadian liners, which use the Cape Race

route during the ice season in the Strait of Belle Isle, and many coastwise craft, schooners and full-rigged fish-carriers. Altogether, thousands of vessels must pass within sight of the cape every year; and it is vessels such as these, astray in the fog, off the beaten track, which come to grief and give the coast its gruesome name. In a single month an Atlantic liner, crowded with passengers, and four tramp steamers were totally wrecked within twenty miles of one another. And once ashore a craft has small chance; the stupendous cliffs, with deep water to their jagged edges, and exposed to the swells of the open ocean, have allowed but one vessel of the seventy that have been wrecked there in the last twenty years to be refloated. The craft on the rocks is furiously pounded to pieces by the first heavy sea; the Delta, a tramp steamship, entirely disappeared from sight three hours after going ashore; and the Regulus, a tramp of near two thousand tons, utterly vanished with the whole ship's company between dark and dawn, leaving her propeller fixed in the cliffs twenty feet above sea-level, where it remains to this day.

"A wreck on this coast disappears like a herring in a whale," said a rueful inhabitant of the cape.

Of wrecks on the cape a record is kept in a more or less accurate fashion; but of the narrow escapes from wreck no

account is taken. There must be an enormous number of these. It is necessary for a bewildered captain, unable to take noonday observations, and running on dead reckoning, to locate the Cape Race fog-whistle. There is no other way to determine his position, and he is in haste in desperate haste, when he thinks of his owners-to get along. Consequently he takes a chance and goes close in murky weather. Steamers have come so close to the cliffs in the fog, indeed, that the fishermen on the heads, unable even to discern an outline of the blind craft, have clearly heard the panic on the bridge when the captain reversed the engine-room signals and in the same breath ordered the life-boats manned. After that they have listened to the churning of the screw, to the orders from the bridge, and to the gradual departure of the vessel from her dangerous position.

Once, at a point beyond range of the fog-whistle, a fisherman heard from the fog not only the orders to reverse the engines and man the life-boats, but a loud command to one of the officers to guard the liquor. Vessels often slip past in the mist, themselves unseen, their presence, peril, and escape from disaster told only by voices coming muffled from the obscurity at sea. Sometimes skippers send boats ashore to inquire the way; but often they go by in

care-free ignorance, without the faintest notion that they have escaped catastrophe by the miracle of a hair's-breadth.

"I heard a feller go by to-day," said a fisherman of Chance Cove. "I allowed he'd fetch up on Fish Reef, by the sound of his course, and waited to see, but he skipped her, and a close skim, too!"

No such chances are taken by the big Canadian liners-neither off Cape Norman, in the Strait of Belle Isle in the summer months, nor off Cape Race when the strait's route is blocked. There is the wireless to guide them; as they go past they receive reports of icebergs and fog areas, and may even be helped to determine their own position in relation to the cape. Upon approach to the Belle Isle Station the ship's wireless picks up the operator ashore. . . . "Can you hear us?" he asks. "I hear your whistle," is the answer. Then the operator ashore sends a message such as the following, to indicate the liner's approach,

position, and departure: "Your whistle is stronger. . . . I hear you better. You are all right, you are abeam. Your whistle is fainter. . . Still fainter. . . . I cannot hear you." By this time the liner is of course safely past the cape. If she is inclined at any time to run into danger, she is easily warned off by the shore operator.

Tramp steamships, not always equipped with wireless, have no such aid near Cape Race; they must depend upon the light, the power of which is enormously lessened by the fog, great as that power is, and upon the sound of the fogwhistle, which the heaviest fogs greatly limit, if they do not altogether stifle it beyond reasonable safe distance. At the Belle Isle Light there are two lanternsone high, for the times when the fog lies low, and one low, for the times when the fog floats high. There is also a high and a low fog - whistle. At Cape Race, however, there is but one light and one whistle.