Our plans were somewhat interfered with by a rescue we made. We found a Glasgow bark, New York bound, in the Bay of Fundy, and her crew in hard straits. We stood down and after a lot of trouble took them off--Clancy and Long Steve in the dory. Billie Hurd came near being the second man in the dory, but Clancy, grabbing him as he had one foot over the rail, hauled him back with, "Way for your elders, little man," and jumped in beside Long Steve. "Elders, but not betters," said Hurd. "Have it your own way," answered Clancy, "but I go in the dory." The rescue was really a fine thing, but the important thing was that some of the rescued men had been exposed to the battering of the sea so long that they needed medical attention, and so we drove for home--and cracked our foremast-head doing it. That delayed us almost a week, for the skipper had to have that spar just so. A lot might depend on it, same as the rest of the gear. And it was a spar--as fine a bit of timber, Oregon pine of course, as was ever set up in a fisherman. And maybe that too was just as well, with the race coming on. By the time we were down the Cape shore--down Canso way--and among the fleet again, we had lost a week. Our hold was still to fill up, and only two weeks and a day to the race. Wesley Marrs, Tom O'Donnell, Sam Hollis, and the rest were then talking of going home and making ready for the race. Bottoms would have to be scrubbed, extra gear put ashore--a whole lot of things done--and a few try-outs in the Bay by way of tuning up. The race was the talk of all the fleet. Half the crews on the Cape shore wanted to be in Gloucester when the race came off, and some of the skippers of the slower vessels, which would not enter because they had no show to win, were already scheming to be home just before the race so that they could be on hand to follow it. The morning after we were back among the fleet we got a small school right from under the eyes of the Lynx, one of the English cutters which were patrolling the coast to see that we didn't get any fish within the three-mile limit. I remember that while we were satisfied at the time that we were outside the line, we did not know what the revenue-cutter might say, and particularly the Lynx, whose captain had a hard name among our fleet for his readiness to suspect law-breaking when there wasn't any. The cutter people generally seemed to want to be fair toward us, but this Lynx's captain was certainly a vindictive cuss. Anything hailing from Gloucester was an abomination in his eyes. And so this morning, when, after we had decided that we were outside the limit, and made ready to set, it was hard to have to take the order of the Lynx and sheer off. Our judgment of distance ought to have been as good as his--better, really, we thought it, because we were always judging distances at sea, and more at home upon the sea, too. But that made no difference--what the cutter people said had to be law for us.