hovers about them like a hen guarding her chickens, sailing a triangular beat planned to include all the smaller boats, yet it too often happens that night falls with one boat missing.  Then on the schooner all is watchfulness.  Cruising slowly about, burning flares and blowing the hoarse fog-horn, those on board search for the missing ones until day dawns or the lost are found.  Sometimes day comes in a fog, a dense, dripping, gray curtain, more impenetrable than the blackest night, for through it no flare will shine, and even the sound of the braying horn or tolling bell is so curiously distorted, that it is difficult to tell from what quarter it comes.  No one who has not seen a fog on the Banks can quite imagine its dense opaqueness.  When it settles down on a large fleet of fishermen, with hundreds of dories out, the peril and perplexity of the skippers are extreme.  In one instant after the dull gray curtain falls over the ocean, each vessel is apparently as isolated as though alone on the Banks.  A dory forty feet away is invisible.  The great fleet of busy schooners, tacking back and forth, watching their boats, is suddenly, obliterated.  Hoarse cries, the tooting of horns and the clanging of bells, sound through the misty air, and now and then a ghostly schooner glides by, perhaps scraping the very gunwale and carrying away bits of rail and rigging to the accompaniment of New England profanity.  This is the dangerous moment for every one on the Banks, for right through the center of the fishing ground lies the pathway of the great steel ocean steamships plying between England and the United States.  Colossal engines force these great masses of steel through sea and fog.  Each captain is eager to break a record; each one knows that a reputation for fast trips will make his ship popular and increase his usefulness to the company.  In theory he is supposed to slow down in crossing the Banks; in fact his great 12,000-ton ship rushes through at eighteen miles an hour.  If she hits a dory and sends two men to their long rest, no one aboard the ocean leviathan will ever know it.  If she strikes a schooner and shears through her like a knife through cheese, there will be a slight vibration of the steel fabric, but not enough to alarm the passengers; the lookout will have caught a hasty glimpse of a ghostly craft, and heard plaintive cries for help, then the fog shuts down on all, like the curtain on the last act of a tragedy.  Even if the great steamship were stopped at once, her momentum would carry her a mile beyond the spot before a boat could be lowered, and then it would be almost impossible to find the floating wreckage in the fog.  So, usually, the steamships press on with unchecked speed, their officers perhaps breathing a sigh of pity for the victims, but reflecting that it is a sailor’s peril to which those on the biggest and staunchest of ships are exposed almost equally with the fishermen.  For was it not on the Banks and in a fog that the blow was struck which sent “La Bourgogne” to the bottom with more than four hundred souls?