There was reason for our solicitude, for we knew very well that a large proportion of the men who get adrift in the fog are never found alive. Shortly before this experience we had spoken a Gloucester vessel and learned that her crew had picked up, a short time before, one of the boats of a Provincetown schooner that had been adrift four days. One of the two men was dead and the other insane. Each day brought its own dangers, which the fishermen met as part of the day's work, thinking little of them when they were past, and ready for whatever another day might bring. But four months is a long time to be out of sight of land, on a fresh fish and "salt hoss" diet, with molasses instead of sugar in your tea, and fresh water too much needed for drinking purposes to waste in personal ablutions. We all swore that we would never go to sea again; and when, after gliding into harbor in the night, we looked, one clear September morning, on the seemingly unnatural green of the grass and trees of the old North Shore, I said to myself, "This is God's country, if there ever was one, and I, for one, will never get out of sight of it again." But I had tasted fog and brine, and the "landlubber's" lot was too monotonously tame for me. The next spring saw me on the deck of the same schooner headed for the Newfoundland Banks, the home of the codfish and the fog. A seafaring ancestry and a boyhood spent within sound of the surf doubtless had much to do with my love of the salt water. My grandfather was one of six brothers who were sea captains, and our family had clung to the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay almost since the first white settler had moored his bark in that vicinity, more than two hundred years before. My boyhood home was originally a fishing town, since changed to manufacturing, and was fragrant with traditions of the sea. Many of the neighborhood homes in which I visited as a boy had souvenirs of the ocean displayed on the mantelpiece or on the everlasting solitude of the parlor table. There were great conch shells that a boy could put to his ear and hear the surf roaring on the beaches from which they had been taken; articles made of sandalwood; curiously wrought things under glass; miniature pagodas; silk scarfs; bow-legged idols; and a wonderful model of the good ship Dolphin, or of some other equally staunch craft, in which the breadwinner, father or son, had sailed on some eventful voyage. These had all been "brought from over sea," I was told, and this gave me the impression that "over sea" must be a very rich and interesting place. But the souvenirs of the sea were not as interesting to me as its survivors. We had in our town, and especially in our end of it, which was called "the Cove," a choice assortment of old sea dogs who had sailed every sea, in every clime--had seen the world, in fact, and were not averse, under the stimulus of good listeners, to telling all they knew about it and sometimes a little more.