THE “ALICE JEAN”.

One moonlit night a ship drove in,

A ghost ship from the west,

Drifting with bare mast and lone tiller,

Like a mermaid drest

In long green weed and barnacles:

She beached and came to rest.

All the watchers of the coast

Flocked to view the sight,

Men and women streaming down

Through the summer night,

Found her standing tall and ragged

Beached in the moonlight.

Then one old woman looked and wept

“The‘ Alice Jean’? But no!

The ship that took my Dick from me

Sixty years ago

Drifted back from the utmost west

With the ocean's flow?

“Caught and caged in the weedy pool

Beyond the western brink,

Where crewless vessels lie and rot in waters black as ink.

Torn out again by a sudden storm

Is it the‘ Jean’, you think?”

A hundred women stared agape,

The menfolk nudged and laughed,

But none could find a likelier story

For the strange craft.

With fear and death and desolation

Rigged fore and aft.

The blind ship came forgotten home

To all but one of these

Of whom none dared to climb aboard her:

And by and by the breeze

Sprang to a storm and the “Alice Jean”

Foundered in frothy seas.