He crept in nearer and nearer, but no shore came in sight.  The fog was now so thick that he could see not more than ten feet from the boat, but if he was in the mouth of the Slough he should have grounded on the marsh bank long before.  The reason that he did not, a reason which did not occur to him at the time, was that the marshes were four feet under water.  Owing to the tremendous tide Pounddug Slough was now merely a continuation of the Harbor and almost as wide.

The lightkeeper began to think that he must have miscalculated his distance.  He could not have rowed as far as he thought.  Therefore, he again turned the dory’s nose into the teeth of the wind and pulled steadily on.  At intervals he stopped and listened.  All he heard was the moan of distant foghorns and the whistling of the gusts in trees somewhere at his left.  There were pine groves scattered all along the bluffs on the Eastboro side, so this did not help him much except to prove that the shore was not far away.  He pulled harder on the right oar.  Then he stopped once more to listen.

Another blast howled through the distant trees and swept down upon him.  Then, borne on the wind, he heard from somewhere ahead, and alarmingly near at hand, other sounds, voices, calls for help.

“Ahoy!” he shouted.  “Ahoy there!  Who is it?  Where are you?”

“Help!” came the calls again—­and nearer.  “Help!”

“Look out!” roared Seth, peering excitedly over his shoulder into the dark.  “Where are you?  Look out or you’ll be afoul of . . .  Jumpin’ Judas!”

For out of the fog loomed a bulky shape driving down upon him.  He pulled frantically at the oars, but it was too late.  A mast rocked against the sky, a stubby bowsprit shot over the dory, and the little boat, struck broadside on, heeled to the water’s edge.  Seth, springing frantically upward, seized the bowsprit and clung to it.  The dory, pushed aside and half full of water, disappeared.  From the deck behind the bowsprit two voices, a man’s voice and a woman’s, screamed wildly.

Seth did not scream.  Clinging to the reeling bowsprit, he swung up on it, edged his way to the vessel’s bows and stepped upon the deck.

“For thunder sakes!” he roared angrily, “what kind of navigation’s this?  Where’s your lights, you lubbers?  What d’you mean by—­Where are you anyhow?  And—­and what schooner’s this?”

For the deck, as much as he could see of it in the dark, looked astonishingly familiar.  As he stumbled aft it became more familiar still.  The ropes, a combination of new and old, the new boards in the deck planking, the general arrangement of things, as familiar to him as the arrangement of furniture in the kitchen of the Lights!  It could not be . . . but it was!  The little schooner was his own, his hobby, his afternoon workshop—­the Daisy M. herself.  The Daisy M., which he had last seen stranded and, as he supposed, hard and fast aground!  The Daisy M. afloat, after all these years!