THE SWEDE'S STORY Captain Holt had selected his crew--picked surfmen, every one of them--and the chief of the bureau had endorsed the list without comment or inquiry.

The captain's own appointment as keeper of the new Life-Saving Station was due as much to his knowledge of men as to his skill as a seaman, and so when his list was sent in--men he said he could "vouch for"-- it took but a moment for the chief to write "Approved" across its face.
Isaac Polhemus came first: Sixty years of age, silent, gray, thick-set; face scarred and seamed by many weathers, but fresh as a baby's; two china-blue eyes--peep-holes through which you looked into his open heart; shoulders hard and tough as cordwood hands a bunch of knots; legs like snubbing-posts, body quick-moving; brain quick-thinking; alert as a dog when on duty, calm as a sleepy cat beside a stove when his time was his own.

Sixty only in years, this man; forty in strength and in skill, twenty in suppleness, and a one-year-old toddling infant in all that made for guile.

"Uncle Ike" some of the younger men once called him, wondering behind their hands whether he was not too old and believing all the time that he was.

"Uncle Ike" they still called him, but it was a title of affection and pride; affection for the man underneath the blue woollen shirt, and pride because they were deemed worthy to pull an oar beside him.
The change took place the winter before when he was serving at Manasquan and when he pulled four men single-handed from out of a surf that would have staggered the bravest.