“Shucks!” said Salters, cutting in.  “You read a little less an’ take more int’rust in your vittles, and you’ll come nearer earnin’ your keep, Penn.”

Harvey, jammed among the fishermen, felt a creepy, crawly, tingling thrill that began in the back of his neck and ended at his boots.  He was cold, too, though it was a stifling day.

“That the actress from Philadelphia?” said Disko Troop, scowling at the platform.  “You’ve fixed it about old man Ireson, hain’t ye, Harve?  Ye know why naow.”

It was not “Ireson’s Ride” that the woman delivered, but some sort of poem about a fishing-port called Brixham and a fleet of trawlers beating in against storm by night, while the women made a guiding fire at the head of the quay with everything they could lay hands on.

    “They took the grandma’s blanket,
    Who shivered and bade them go;
    They took the baby’s cradle,
    Who could not say them no.”

“Whew!” said Dan, peering over Long Jack’s shoulder.  “That’s great!  Must ha’ bin expensive, though.”

“Ground-hog case,” said the Galway man.  “Badly lighted port, Danny.”

    “And knew not all the while
    If they were lighting a bonfire
    Or only a funeral pile.”

The wonderful voice took hold of people by their heartstrings; and when she told how the drenched crews were flung ashore, living and dead, and they carried the bodies to the glare of the fires, asking:  “Child, is this your father?” or “Wife, is this your man?” you could hear hard breathing all over the benches.

    “And when the boats of Brixham
    Go out to face the gales,
    Think of the love that travels
    Like light upon their sails!”

There was very little applause when she finished.  The women were looking for their handkerchiefs, and many of the men stared at the ceiling with shiny eyes.

“H’m,” said Salters; “that ’u’d cost ye a dollar to hear at any theatre—­maybe two.  Some folk, I presoom, can afford it.  ’Seems downright waste to me. . . .  Naow, how in Jerusalem did Cap.  Bart Edwardes strike adrift here?”

“No keepin’ him under,” said an Eastport man behind.  “He’s a poet, an’ he’s baound to say his piece.  ’Comes from daown aour way, too.”

He did not say that Captain B. Edwardes had striven for five consecutive years to be allowed to recite a piece of his own composition on Gloucester Memorial Day.  An amused and exhausted committee had at last given him his desire.  The simplicity and utter happiness of the old man, as he stood up in his very best Sunday clothes, won the audience ere he opened his mouth.  They sat unmurmuring through seven-and-thirty hatchet-made verses describing at fullest length the loss of the schooner Joan Hasken off the Georges in the gale of 1867, and when he came to an end they shouted with one kindly throat.

A far-sighted Boston reporter slid away for a full copy of the epic and an interview with the author; so that earth had nothing more to offer Captain Bart Edwardes, ex-whaler, shipwright, master-fisherman, and poet, in the seventy-third year of his age.