the staithes, as the great sea waves encroached more and more every
minute. The quay-side was unsavourily ornamented with glittering
fish-scales, for the hauls of fish were cleansed in the open air,
and no sanitary arrangements existed for sweeping away any of the
relics of this operation.

The fresh salt breeze was bringing up the lashing, leaping tide from
the blue sea beyond the bar. Behind the returning girls there rocked
the white-sailed ship, as if she were all alive with eagerness for
her anchors to be heaved.

How impatient her crew of beating hearts were for that moment, how
those on land sickened at the suspense, may be imagined, when you
remember that for six long summer months those sailors had been as
if dead from all news of those they loved; shut up in terrible,
dreary Arctic seas from the hungry sight of sweethearts and friends,
wives and mothers. No one knew what might have happened. The crowd
on shore grew silent and solemn before the dread of the possible
news of death that might toll in upon their hearts with this
uprushing tide. The whalers went out into the Greenland seas full of
strong, hopeful men; but the whalers never returned as they sailed
forth. On land there are deaths among two or three hundred men to be
mourned over in every half-year's space of time. Whose bones had
been left to blacken on the gray and terrible icebergs? Who lay
still until the sea should give up its dead? Who were those who
should come back to Monkshaven never, no, never more?

Many a heart swelled with passionate, unspoken fear, as the first
whaler lay off the bar on her return voyage.