houses crowded together on the brink of the cliff above the beach, looking
like a group of hooded old women watching for a belated sail, seemed to
have caught the expression of their inmates' lives. At high tide the hulk
of the Alcazar had been full of water, which was now pouring out through a
hole in the planking of her side in a continuous, murmurous stream, like
the voice of a persistent talker in a silent company. The old ship looked
much too big for her narrow grave at the foot of the green cliff, in which
her anchor was deeply sunk and half overgrown with thistles. Her blunt bow
and the ragged stump of the figure-head rose, dark and high, above the wet
beach where Captain John sat with his absorbed listener. There were rifts
about her rail where the red sunset looked through. Her naked sides, that
for years had been moistened only by the perennial rains and snows, showed
rough and scaly like the armor of some fabled sea-monster. She was tethered
to the cliff by her rusty anchor-chain that swung across the space between,
serving as a clothes-line for the draggled driftweed left by the receding
tide to dry.

"She was a big ship for these parts," Captain John was saying. "There wan't
one like her ever come into these waters before. Lord! folks come down
from the Neck, and from Green's Landin', and Nor'east Harbor, and I don't
know but they come from the main, to see her when she was fust towed in.
And such work as they made of her name! Some called it one way and some
another. It's a kind of a Cubian name, they say. I expect there ain't
anybody round here that can call it right. However 'twas, old Cap'n Green
took and pried it off her starboard quarter, and somebody got hold of it
and nailed it up over the blacksmith's shop; and there you can see it now.
The old cap'n named her the Stranger when he had her refitted. May be you
could make out the tail of an S on her stern if you could git around there.
That name's been gone these forty year; seem's if she never owned to it,
and it didn't stick to her. She was never called anythin' but the Alcazar,