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For t' Red Island Shoal is only three or four miles from t' land, and there be liveyers, as us knew, almost opposite. If t' wind had held in t' same direction even then us might have escaped, but it dropped suddenly about day dawn, and there were huge swatches o' water between us and t' mainland before it came light enough to try and get across.
The whole of the Goodwin Sands are covered by the sea at high water; even the highest or north part of the Sands is then eight or ten feet under water. At low water this north part of the Goodwins is six feet at least above the sea level, and you can walk for miles on a rippled surface cut into curious gulleys, the miniatures of the larger swatches. Wild and lonely beyond words is the scene.
Late in the sealing season of that same year the good ship Artemis, a stout, steel-sheathed ice hunter, a unit of the modern fleet that have long ago displaced the wooden schooners that once in hundreds followed the seal herds, was steaming north to finish up shooting old harps in the swatches, having lost a number of her pans in bad weather farther south.
The telephone buzzed a punctuation to this period. "Baumgartner?" inquired Buck humbly. She listened a moment, then, over her shoulder, "Baumgartner," grimly, her hand covering the mouthpiece "and if he thinks that he can work off a lot of last year's silk swatches on Hello! Yes, Mrs. McChesney talking. Look here, Mr. Baumgartner "
I shall never forget the sensation of striking bottom in one of those swatches where I expected to find, and had found recently before in the same state of the tide, a depth of six feet.
While us sailed about looking for 'em, us lost most o' t' pans. So round t' beginning of April t' skipper, in company with a score of other schooners, put her for the Norrard, in hopes of cutting off some of t' old seals in t' swatches. T' slob being very heavy outside, us lay for inside Belle Isle, and carried open water most across t' Straits.
The people call the seals "swiles." We mostly hauls 'em." Sea-birds have also come in the "swatches" of open water between the pans. A gale of wind and sea has broken up the ice, and driven it out of St. Mien's Bay, which is just round the corner from us. Thousands of "turr" are there, and the men are reaping many a banquet.
The Sands reach round you for miles, and the greater swatches cut you off from still more distant and still more extensive reaches of sand. In such solitudes, and with such vastness around you, of which the great lonely level stretch makes you conscious as nothing ashore can do, you realise what an atom you are in creation. Here you see a ship's ribs.
"Spae my fortune!" said I, laughing; "such swatches of the same as I had in the past were of no nature to make me eager to see what was to follow." "Still and on," said he, "who knows but you may find a wife and a good fortune in a little lurk of the thumb? Jean! Jean! woman," he cried across the chamber to his callet, and over she came to a very indifferent and dubious client.
A moment later the door opened, and Isaac Feinsilver entered, immaculately clothed in a suit of zebra-like design. He proceeded to the bookkeeper's office and kissed the blushing bride; then he repaired to the sample room. "Good morning, Mawruss! Good morning, Abe!" he said briskly. "Ain't it a fine weather?" He threw a bundle of swatches upon the sample table.
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