"These men are the real things," she said, but Clancy, for fear we were getting too much credit, broke in, "Not us seiners. It's the winter fishermen--trawlers and hand-liners--that are the real things. Of course, we lose men now and then seining, but it's in winter up on the shoal water on the Banks that--there's where you have some seas to buck against," and he went on to tell of a battle with a gale on a winter's night on the Grand Banks. Clancy could tell a story as well as anybody I ever met. He could make the blood jump to your heart, or the tears to your eyes--or he could chill you till the blood froze. When he got through you could hear them all breathing--men and women both, like people who had just run a race. "Two hundred and odd men sailing out of Gloucester," he said, "went down that night. There weren't too many came safe out of that blow. The father of this boy here was lost--the Mary Buckley warn't it, Joe?--named for your mother?" "And my father, too, was lost soon after," said Minnie Arkell, and the glance she gave me melted a lot of prejudice I had felt for her. That was the good human side to her. "No better man ever sailed out of Gloucester, Mrs. Miner," said Clancy. She flushed up. "Thank you, Tommie, for that, though I know he was a reckless man." And, she might have added, he left some of his recklessness in the blood of the Arkells. The skipper told them a lot about sea life that night. Some of the stories he told, though long known in Gloucester, they took to be yarns at first. They could not believe that men went through such things and lived. And then the skipper had such an easy way of telling them. After a man has been through a lot of unusual things--had them years behind him and almost forgotten them--I suppose they don't surprise him any more.