service was short, but it was real-that was its keynote; and whether the boys or the speakers struck it most was hard to say.

It was almost the same week that the Spectator attended another service of the sea, still in old Gloucester, that mother of ships and sailors. In this case she was a mother mourning for lost children; for it was the annual memorial service held for Gloucester fishermen lost at sea. For a

few years lately this service, for one reason or other, was discontinued; but in 1909 it was revived, and is now held out of doors, instead of in a church, as formerly. Stage Fort Park, that historic sweep of granite rocks and grassy glades, has been chosen as its most appropriate setting. A procession of the townspeople started from Town Hall Square in the afternoon, and the Spectator, looking · from the rocks, could see them marching forward along the water-front and over Blynman Bridge, led by a band playing appropriately solemn and martial music. Groups of children with flowers in their hands-not hot-house blossoms. but the hardy cottage flowers that bloom in every Gloucester dooryard-were everywhere in the march, and sat close around the speak ers when the procession reached a grassy amphitheater under drooping elms and settled itself for the memorial service.

"What class of men," says Wilfred Grenfell (who knows pre-eminently whereof he speaks), " preserve as well that God-given genius of our English-speaking race, the genius for the sea, as do the world-known men of the famous fishing fleet from Gloucester? As seamen and fishermen they are unsurpassed to-day." But their very excellence means the continual facing of danger; and the simple reading of the "roll-call" in that grassy glade was full of a poignant pathos. Forty-seven names-some young, some old, some single, some leaving penniless

widows and orphans were read in a hushed stillness. It was a brave roll-call, one of humble heroes, living and dying in a stern business that is not for cowardsa roll-call of which any city might be proud; and it gave a depth to the quiet, almost homely, service that made it more impressive than any eloquence. Beyond, the harbor lay blue in the summer sun. with only the tide racing out under Blynman Bridge to show that the sea was alive and hungry-that smiling sea which welcomes deets only to wreck them if it can, and yet into which the Gloucester fisherman sails out as calmly as the Kansas farmer goes into his corn-field.

When the hymns were over and the prayers said, the procession started back again, and now the children with their flowers were close at the front. Blynman

Bridge was crowded with onlookers, but they made way for the flower-bearers, who pushed to the railings. Below the swift tide rushed out to the sea, and on it, as a fitting end to the memorial tribute, the childish hands dropped the scattering nosegays. Crimson and gold and purple, marigold and aster and nasturtium and dahlia, the dooryard flowers of the fishermen, they were swept away toward the ocean, under whose depths lay the dead who would never again tread the rocky streets toward home. They were so few, so pathetic, those handfuls of flowers swept and submerged by the rushing tide, that they brought a catch in the throat, and a sense of the vastness against which these men had gone forth, and which had swept them into oblivion. "Save me, O God-the ocean is so wide, and my boat is so small!”—the Gloucester fisherman, like the Breton one, may well repeat this prayer in the face of the grim toll of the ocean. But still he goes forth; and still each year this service of the sea commemorates his steady courage and flings the tribute of a town's remembrance on the tides of its harbor.