Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 155, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 June 1910 — LIGHT-SHIPS OF NANTUCKET. [ARTICLE]

LIGHT-SHIPS OF NANTUCKET.

Type of Men Who Man Floatioff Beacon* of the Atlantic Coaat. The mate, himself a quiet enough man, had some gift of conversation, and with quaintly unconscious pathos told of his pride in his wife and his two children and of their comfortable home over on the mainland, "all paid for and no mortgage.” He displayed photographs of the little family group and an individual likeness of “the finest woman in Massachusetts, sir." And, Indeed, the photo gave no lie to his words of praise. His was a-closely knit frame, reminding one of nothing so much as one of the blunt-nosed buoys out in Butler’s hole, a thing built for rough usage and indifferent, to all feathers. His vocation was as plainly Imprinted on his face, his clothes, the walk and carriage of him as the great sign on the side of his ship. His arms were as Jhick as the trunk of a small tree, his* fingers were tholepins, and his face was the color of tanned hide. He had the unpolished sincerity of those who have had no call to cultivate a cunning mind; youth and man, he had grown up on heaving waters and the stable land only fretted him. Aboard this coastwise vessel he was fairly in reach of his home and those he cherished, and at the same time he rode delightedly upon the restive sea and breathed the brine-laden air which spelled for him happiness and congenial occupation. Harper’s Weekly gays the mate of the Shovelful is a type, in the main, of nearly all the men who operate these lightships of Nantucket sound. He symbolizes both officers and crews afloat in this navigable maelstrom. Of their mental fiber, of their calm acceptance of fate’s rancors and malevolences, one act of the Shovelful’s mate is a lucid demonstration. The man had suffered excruciating torture from toothache all one day; he had almost been sullen in his mood, but said noth-. Lng of his pain. Somewhere in ihe neighborhood of midnight (but not unobserved, as he believed) he had gone quietly to the ship’s toolchest and, selecting the most likely Implement a not too delicate instrument, it is safe to say—had marched aft, and, in the shadow of the -mast, had wrenched from its rooted bed in his nether jaw the offending molar. There was, to'be sure, nothing of the poetry of heroics in this homely deed, but better than anything else does it prove the stern, uncompromising character of the man. You would not seek to quarrel with one whose physical stamina enabled him to extract his own teeth, and you might reasonably hope to see him come gayly out of any tight place in life; nor would it be unreasonable to expect him to override any huge - and do the thing without ostentation or bravado.