A brisk breeze, with a touch of the spring, blew up from the south, and the “Polly,” heedless of the tide, turned her head to it, sniffing and breathing it, bobbing and jerking nervously at her anchor, impatient to be dressed in her cloud of canvas, and away where the wind blows free and the curl dashes high under the forefoot. WHEN THE SNOW MELTS Ashore in Gloucester town there are signs a-plenty of the work to come. The sleepy village throws off her white mantle and rises from the lethargy of the winter past. The spring is in the air, and the docks and wharves, white and ice-trussed during the long, bleak winter, are trod by groups of men, rubber-coated and “sou’ westered,” moving briskly from one shed to another. In the town they gather like the stray birds of spring that flutter under the eaves of the store-houses. By twos and threes they appear. On street corners they meet, pipe-smoking, reminiscent, gloomily hopeful for the future, and grateful that they have helped themselves over “March Hill” without a loan from owner or buyer. And as they lounge from post-office to store, from store to shed, and back again, their talk is of dealings with owners and skippers, of vessels and luck. For luck is their fortune. It means larger profits by shares, new dresses for the wife and little ones, and perhaps an easy time of it in the winter to follow. It means that there will be no long, hard winter of it at the haddock-fisheries at “George’s,” where trawls are to be set in weather which makes frozen hands and feet, and perhaps a grave in an icy sea, where thousands have gone before. The skipper of the “Polly,” even before he gets his men, has broken out his gear and reckoned up his necessities for the run up to the Banks. If he ships the same crew he had the year before, they work in well together. The “Polly’s” topmasts are run up with a hearty will and a rush. There is a cheerful clatter of block and tackle, and the joyous “Yeo-ho” echoes from one schooner to another as sail and rigging are fitted and run into place. The snow yet lingers in little patches on the moors when some of the vessels warp down to an anchorage. Dories are broken from their nests and skim lightly across the harbor, now alive with a fleet in miniature. Jests and greetings fill the air, as old shipmates and dory-mates meet again,--Gloucester men some of them, but more often Swedes, Portuguese, and men from the South. For to-day the fleet is not owned in the villages, and Gloucester, once the centre of the fishing aristocracy, the capital of the nation of the Banks, is now but a trading- and meeting-place for half the sea-people who come from the North and East.