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Assuring him that I would like to try the experiment, with him as skipper, I begged to know the history of the case he had spoken of.

The old fisherman smiled complacently, hitched up his pantaloons, took a seat beside us, and, after extracting a jack-knife from one pocket, and a hand of tobacco from the other, and deliberately supplying himself with a fresh quid, he mentioned, apologetically, that he supposed the Doctor had heard it all before.

“Yes, twenty times,” said the Doctor; “but never mind; it’s a good story yet. Go ahead, Skipper.”

“Well, you see,” said the Skipper, “this young Wilson comes down here from Hanover College, in the spring, as lean as a shad in dog-days. He had studied himself half blind, and all his blood had got into brains. So the Doctor tried to help him with his poticary stuff, and the women with their herbs; but all did no good. At last somebody advised him to try a fishing cruise down East; and so he persuaded me to take him aboard my schooner. I knew he’d be right in the way, and poor company at the best, for all his Greek and Latin; for, as a general thing, I’ve noticed that your college chaps swop away their common sense for their larning, and make a mighty poor bargain of it. Well, he brought his books with him, and stuck to them so close that I was afraid we should have to slide him off the plank before we got half way to Labrador. So I just told him plainly that it would n’t do, and that if he ‘d a mind to kill himself ashore I ‘d no objection, but he should n’t do it aboard my schooner. ‘I’m e’en just a mind,’ says I, ‘to pitch your books overboard. A fishing vessel’s no place for ’em; they’ll spoil all our luck. Don’t go to making a Jonah of yourself down here in your bunk, but get upon deck, and let your books alone, and go to watching the sea, and the clouds, and the islands, and the fog-banks, and the fishes, and the birds; for Natur,’ says I, don’t lie nor give hearsays, but is always as true as the Gospels.’

“But ‘t was no use talking. There he’d lay in his bunk with his books about him, and I had e’en a’most to drag him on deck to snuff the sea- air. Howsomever, one day,–it was the hottest of the whole season,– after we left the Magdalenes, and were running down the Gut of Canso, we hove in sight of the Gannet Rocks. Thinks I to myself, I’ll show him something now that he can’t find in his books. So I goes right down after him; and when we got on deck he looked towards the northeast, and if ever I saw a chap wonder-struck, he was. Right ahead of us was a bold, rocky island, with what looked like a great snow bank on its southern slope; while the air was full overhead, and all about, of what seemed a heavy fall of snow. The day was blazing hot, and there was n’t a cloud to be seen.

“‘What in the world, Skipper, does this mean?’ says he. ‘We’re sailing right into a snow-storm in dog-days and in a clear sky.’

“By this time we had got near enough to hear a great rushing noise in the air, every moment growing louder and louder.

“‘It’s only a storm of gannets,’ says I.

“‘Sure enough!’ says he; ‘but I wouldn’t have believed it possible.’

“When we got fairly off against the island I fired a gun at it: and such a fluttering and screaming you can’t imagine. The great snow-banks shook, trembled, loosened, and became all alive, whirling away into the air like drifts in a nor’wester. Millions of birds went up, wheeling and zigzagging about, their white bodies and blacktipped wings crossing and recrossing and mixing together into a thick grayish-white haze above us.