Northward the boat labored, sometimes making a long circuit where a weir straggled into the sea, sometimes tossing an oar's length from the giant columns and boulders, and always without a sign of human beings, and always preceded by the ominous, echoing cries of startled sea gulls.
"Black Harbor's round this p'int," said the boatman at last.
At the point the cliffs were split asunder into a mighty cove, across the mouth of which ran a bleak sea wall higher than a man's head,—all of gray stones as round as cannon-balls,—wave-built, impregnable, Cyclopean masonry. Through a gap midway in this wall the boat entered Black Harbor.
Letting her run in the still water, the Yankee mopped his bald forehead and grinned.
"Cheerful sort o' place, ain't it?" he asked. "Real homelike and neighborly."
It was a place where Old-World smugglers might land their brandy kegs, or where pirates might put in and share alike. Instead of these, two or three dismantled sloops and pinkies lay moored in a half- circle of dark
