Now, Mister Macliver, you knows him quite well, He comes upon deck and he cuts a great swell; It's damn your eyes there and it's damn your eyes here, And straight to the gangway he takes a broad sheer.                          —La Pique “Come-all-ye.”  

       Into Saturday Cove, all during that late afternoon, they came surging—spars and tackle limned against the on-sweeping pall of the gray fog—those wayfarers of the open main.     

       First to roll in past the ledgy portals of the haven were the venerable sea-wagons—the coasters known as the “Apple-treers.” Their weatherwise skippers, old sea-dogs who could smell weather as bloodhounds sniff trails, had their noses in the air in good season that day, and knew that they must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp of running rigging.     

       A 'long-coast shanty explains the nickname, “Apple-treers”:     

      O, what's the use of compass or a quadrant or a log? Keep her loafin' on her mudhook in a norther or a fog. But as soon's the chance is better, then well ratch her off once more, Keepin' clost enough for bearings from the apple-trees ashore. 

       Therefore, the topsail schooners, the fore-and-afters, the Bluenose blunt-prows, came in early before the fog smooched out the loom of the trees and before it became necessary to guess at what the old card compasses had to reveal on the subject of courses.     

       And so, along with the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking harbor and holding-ground, came the ancient schooner Polly. Fog-masked by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal—a picture from the past.     

       She had an out-thrust of snub bow and an upcock of square stern, and sag of waist—all of which accurately revealed ripe antiquity, just as a bell-crowned beaver and a swallow-tail coat with brass buttons would identify an old 

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