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have mines of gold and silver and stones of great price. While the English play with poverty, the Spains play with empires! In New England we shall eat salt cods or starve — which is much the same, for salt cods are a poor diet. But in the South we shall maybe catch a galleon with a vast treasure.” And with that, very serious and sure of his rightness, he sat down.

“Yea, Yacob! Yea, Yacob!” they bawled and delighting in the alliteration cried it again, over and over. Paul Craig, heavy with sated gluttony, piped a shrill “Yea, Yacob,” and the Old One pounded the table and grinned, for he had sailed many seas in Jacob’s company. Phil Marsham — nay, and even Will Canty, too! — pricked ears at the sound of Spanish galleons; for the blue Caribbean and the blue hills of the main were fabled, as all knew, to hold such wealth as according to the tales of the old travellers was to be found in Cathay or along the banks of the first of the four rivers out of Paradise. And was not a Spanish ship fair prey for the most law-abiding of English mariners?

There was a hubbub of talk as they sat there, and there was no doubt but they were of one mind to turn their backs on the bleak northern coast and seek a golden fortune in the south. But the council arrived suddenly at an end when down from the deck came the lingering call, ‘‘A sa-i-l! A sa-i-l!”

Up, then, the Old One leaped, and he raised his hand. ‘‘A sail is cried. What say you?”

"Let us not cast away what God hath offered us!”

“Yea, Yacob!”

“Up, you dogs in the steerage! A hall, a hall!”

One fell over on the table in drunken torpor. Another rushed out the door and tumbled over a sleeper at the threshold.