Adventure Magazine Cover — page 182: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

174 admiringly, asking him questions of the world out-side, and listening to him telling strange tales of the sea and of ships. As the conversation lapses the old fore- man speaks: “T was to have been a sailor too. I had two brothers once, and both of them was drowned at sea. My father, he was drowned at sea. I was to go to sea too, but my old mother cried it out of me. ‘Peter,’ she says, ‘let’s go to America and forget the cold sea.’ That’s how I come to America. We were from up by Bergen way. It’s fine to travel about and to see things. But my old mother, she cried me away from the sea.”’ Beside the water, at Sausalito, there is a little house, overgrown with flowers, and surrounded by tall trees, beneath whose shade there often sits an old man, gazing across the bay—watching the steamers come and go. Sometimes, very seldom now, a square- rigger steals in upon the wind of afternoon and he, arising, peers hard at her through his glasses—as if expecting to see some well- remembered numbers breaking at her peak. Adventure At his side there stands a woman, whose dark hair is intermingled with shining strands of gold, and threads of silver; watch- ing, with him, the ship that comes to anchorage. Sometimes, when the China mail comes in, a lean-faced man with quiet deep-brown eyes, stepping from the ferry, comes to the little house to stay awhile; sitting with them of an evening in the flowery garden, and going, as the mists arise upon the bay, to sit before an open fire in a room whose windows look toward the distant city. Upon the wall there hangs the picture of a clipper ship, with her three skysails set, her lee railing awash in the sea; beside it another, of a little bark, with hands aloft stowing the royals as she comes to an- chorage. Above them hangs the picture of a dark- haired woman; below the picture of a girl. Sometimes they stand together, arm in arm, looking at the pictures on the wall— and sometimes go to stand before a little shelf on which there sits an iron-headed doll—the idol of these people of the sea. INCENSE by Sherman Ripley TE incense rises gray in a lazy spiral sway To a thousand gods from here to Hindustan; And I’ve seen it floating there round the heathen idol’s hair Up to where the gilded temple dome began. Aye, in many a mystic shrine where the jeweled idols shine, And where the sacred crocodiles are fed, The incense climbs and turns as the holy fire burns, And clouds the dingy arches overhead. In the cherry-blossom isles where majestic Buddha smiles, And ’cross the bay along in China, too, Where tall pagodas rise, pointing fingers at the skies The curling incense clouds the temples blue. In Burma where the palms swing their ever graceful arms, In a place the simple tourist never goes, There’s a mosque of teak and jade with an incense-burning maid Wearing bangles on her coffee-colored toes I’ve foregathered up and down, with both yellow men and brown, And I’ve seen the incense weaving strange designs; But the incense that I love, as it winds its way above Is the smoke of my own camp-fire in the pines. GO NOOLK< S (©