Spills the foresail, but a clumsy
    Wind-flaw with a hand like stone
    Hurls the boom round.  In an instant
    Arnold, Master, there alone

    Sees a crushed corpse shot to seaward,
    With the gray doom in its face;
    And the climbing foam receives it
    To its everlasting place.

    What does Arnold, Master, think you? 
    Whimper like a child for dread? 
    That’s not Arnold.  Foulest weather
    Strongest sailors ever bred.

    And this slip of taut sea-faring
    Grows a man who throttles fear. 
    Let the storm and dark in spite now
    Do their worst with valor here!

    Not a reef and not a shiver,
    While the wind jeers in her shrouds,
    And the flauts of foam and sea-fog
    Swarm upon her deck in crowds,

    Flies the Scud like a mad racer;
    And with iron in his frown,
    Holding hard by wrath and dreadnought,
    Arnold, Master, rides her down.

    Let the taffrail shriek through foam-heads! 
    Let the licking seas go glut
    Elsewhere their old hunger, baffled! 
    Arnold’s making for the Gut.

    Cleft sheer down, the sea-wall mountains
    Give that one port on the coast;
    Made, the Basin lies in sunshine! 
    Missed, the little Scud is lost!

    Come now, fog-horn, let your warning
    Rip the wind to starboard there! 
    Suddenly that burly-throated
    Welcome ploughs the cumbered air.

    The young master hauls a little,
    Crowds her up and sheets her home,
    Heading for the narrow entry
    Whence the safety signals come.

    Then the wind lulls, and an eddy
    Tells of ledges, where away;
    Veers the Scud, sheet free, sun breaking,
    Through the rifts, and—­there’s the bay!

    Like a bird in from the storm-beat,
    As the summer sun goes down,
    Slows the schooner to her moorings
    By the wharf at Digby town.

    All the world next morning wondered. 
    Largest letters, there it stood,
    “Storm in Fundy.  A Boy’s Daring. 
    Arnold, Master of the Scud.”

THE SHIPS OF ST. JOHN

    Smile, you inland hills and rivers! 
    Flush, you mountains in the dawn! 
    But my roving heart is seaward
    With the ships of gray St. John.

    Fair the land lies, full of August,
    Meadow island, shingly bar,
    Open barns and breezy twilight,
    Peace and the mild evening star.

    Gently now this gentlest country
    The old habitude takes on,
    But my wintry heart is outbound
    With the great ships of St. John.

    Once in your wide arms you held me,
    Till the man-child was a man,
    Canada, great nurse and mother
    Of the young sea-roving clan.