snarling is hidden far below the surface) from the tide-vexed,
storm-worn prow of old Cape Race. The pull and drift of many of these
currents are felt far out from land, and they cannot be charted because
of their shiftings, and their shiftings cannot be calculated with any
degree of accuracy, because they seem to be without system or law. These
are dangerous waters even now; and before the safeguard of a strong
light on the cape, in the days when ships were helplessly dragged by the
sea when there was no wind to drive them--in the days before a
"lee-shore" had ceased to be an actual peril to become a picturesque
phrase in nautical parlance--they constituted one of the most notorious
disaster-zones of the North Atlantic.

We are told, as were our fathers before us, that one man's poison may be
another man's meat, and that it is an ill wind indeed that does not blow
an advantage to somebody. The fundamental truths of these ancient saws
were fully realized by the people of Chance Along. Ships went down in
battered fragments to their clashing sea-graves, which was bad, Heaven
knows, for the crews and the owners--but ashore, stalwart and gratified
folk who had noted the storms and the tides ate well and drank deep and
went warmly clad, who might otherwise have felt the gnawing of hunger
and the nip of the wind.

The people of Chance Along, with but a few exceptions, were Nolans,
Lynches, Learys and Brennens. Their forebears had settled at the back of
the cleft in the cliff a hundred years or more before the time of this
history. They had been at the beginning, and still were, ignorant and
primitive folk. Fishing in the treacherous sea beyond their sheltered
retreat had been their occupation for several generations, brightened
and diversified occasionally by a gathering of the fruits of storm. It
was not until Black Dennis Nolan's time, however, that the community