During the same storm the schooner Burnham was struck so suddenly and with such violence by a sea as to turn her bottom up and throw her skipper, James Nickerson, and his crew, who were below, upon the ceiling, where they lay sprawling for a moment until the vessel righted herself. There was one man on deck when she was struck, Hector McIsaac. He saw the wave coming and leapt into the shrouds. With his legs locked in the ratlines he went down into the foaming sea, and when the crew came on deck there was Hector McIsaac still clinging to the shrouds. Captain Nickerson was subsequently lost in a dory from the Bellerophon on the Banks, and Hector McIsaac went down in the Nathaniel Webster in 1881, together with his brother. Everybody who lives in Gloucester is interested in the fishing industry, and so it falls out that the city's life is about equally made up of intervals of joy and sorrow. When summer opens the general tone of public feeling is bright and hopeful, but at the end of the season, as the fishers come in, some with flags at half-mast, others bearing fateful news, the whole town is depressed. All the residents show a concern in the sailors who are lost and in the welfare of their families. Even citizens of fortune who suffer no personal bereavement have been brought closely into touch with the poor fishing families through repeated tragedies at sea. The scenes in the fishing quarters during the late fall and winter months when news of death is brought by almost every returning boat are most pathetic. Sometimes the news comes with a shock, at others wives and children wait for weeks in anxiety and never know the details of the fate of their loved ones. The immediate wants of the families of lost sailors are looked after by the Gloucester Relief Association. Almost everybody in the town subscribes to this, rich and poor alike, as well as the sailors living along the shore and in Nova Scotia, all of whom sail in the Gloucester vessels. When there is a disaster the nearest relatives of the men lost receive a sum proportionate to the amount which the subscribers have paid into the association. In addition, voluntary subscriptions are made by churches and societies in Gloucester and Boston once a year and distributed at the time of the annual memorial service in February. This service held in the city hall of Gloucester is unique in its way. Everybody in the city takes an interest in it and, with shops closed and business suspended, the day is one of general mourning. But neither death nor its solemn reminders can rob the boy born and bred in Gloucester of hunger for the time when he, too, may hazard life and fortune on the distant fishing grounds; and gray Mother Ocean, kindly and cruel by turns, claims him for her own, singing to-day of his hardihood and to-morrow--chanting his requiem. CHAPTER II AN OCEAN FLYER'S CREW