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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77366 ***
+
+
+[Illustration: WHITE ISLAND, LOOKING SOUTHWEST FROM APPLEDORE.]
+
+
+
+
+                     _Among the Isles of Shoals._
+
+                           BY CELIA THAXTER.
+
+                          With Illustrations.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+          “Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine.”
+
+                                                    TENNYSON.
+
+                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+                     The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+
+
+
+
+             COPYRIGHT, 1873, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY
+
+                  COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY ROLAND THAXTER
+
+          COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY ROLAND THAXTER AND JOHN THAXTER
+
+                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ WHITE ISLAND, LOOKING SOUTHWEST
+ FROM APPLEDORE            _Frontispiece._
+
+ TRAP DIKE, APPLEDORE       Page      18
+
+ WHITE ISLAND                 “      120
+
+ VIEW FROM THE SOUTHEASTERN
+ POINT OF APPLEDORE           “      180
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+It is with reluctance that I suffer these fragmentary and inadequate
+sketches of the Isles of Shoals to appear in book form. Except that
+some account of the place, however slight, is so incessantly called for
+by people who throng these islands in summer, I should hardly venture
+to offer to the public so imperfect a chronicle, of which the most that
+can be said is, that it is, perhaps, better than nothing.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS.
+
+
+In a series of papers published not many years ago, Herman Melville
+made the world acquainted with the “Encantadas,” or Enchanted Islands,
+which he describes as lying directly under the equator, off the coast
+of South America, and of which he says: “It is to be doubted whether
+any spot of earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this
+group.” But their dark volcanic crags and melancholy beaches can
+hardly seem more desolate than do the low bleached rocks of the Isles
+of Shoals to eyes that behold them for the first time. Very sad they
+look, stern, bleak, and unpromising, yet are they enchanted islands in
+a better sense of the word than are the great Galapagos of which Mr.
+Melville discourses so delightfully.
+
+There is a strange charm about them, an indescribable influence in
+their atmosphere, hardly to be explained, but universally acknowledged.
+People forget the hurry and worry and fret of life after living there
+awhile, and, to an imaginative mind, all things become dreamy as they
+were to the lotus-eaters, to whom
+
+                    “The gushing of the wave
+        Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave
+        On alien shores.”
+
+The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear
+away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become
+blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the
+mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland, amid the rush and
+stir of people and things, and the excitements of social life. This
+was strikingly illustrated during the late war, which, while it wrung
+the heart of the whole country, and stirred the blood of every man,
+woman, and child on the continent, left the handful of human beings
+upon these lonely rocks almost untouched. The echoes of woe and terror
+were so faint and far they seemed to lose their significance among the
+many-voiced waters they crossed, and reached at last the indifferent
+ears they sought with no more force than a spent wave.
+
+Nine miles of the Atlantic Ocean intervene between these islands and
+the nearest point of the coast of New Hampshire; but from this nearest
+point the coast-line recedes gradually, in dim and dimmer distance, to
+Cape Ann, in Massachusetts, twenty-one miles away at the southwest, and
+to Cape Neddock, in Maine, sixteen miles distant in the northeast (in
+clear weather another cape is faintly distinguishable beyond this),
+and about one third of the great horizon is filled by this beautiful,
+undulating line of land, which, under the touch of atmospheric change,
+is almost as plastic as the clouds, and wears a new aspect with every
+turn of wind and weather.
+
+Sailing out from Portsmouth Harbor with a fair wind from the
+northwest, the Isles of Shoals lie straight before you, nine miles
+away,--ill-defined and cloudy shapes, faintly discernible in the
+distance. A word about the origin of this name, “Isles of Shoals.” They
+are supposed to have been so called, not because the ragged reefs run
+out beneath the water in all directions, ready to wreck and destroy,
+but because of the “shoaling,” or “schooling,” of fish about them,
+which, in the mackerel and herring seasons, is remarkable. As you
+approach they separate, and show each its own peculiar characteristics,
+and you perceive that there are six islands if the tide is low; but if
+it is high, there are eight, and would be nine, but that a breakwater
+connects two of them. Appledore, called for many years Hog Island,
+from its rude resemblance to a hog’s back rising from the water, when
+seen from out at sea, is the largest and most regular in shape. From
+afar, it looks smoothly rounded, like a gradually sloping elevation,
+the greatest height of which is only seventy-five feet above high-water
+mark. A little valley in which are situated the buildings belonging to
+the house of entertainment, which is the only habitation, divides its
+four hundred acres into two unequal portions. Next, almost within a
+stone’s throw, is Haley’s Island, or “Smutty-nose,” so christened by
+passing sailors, with a grim sense of humor, from a long black point
+of rock stretching out to the southeast, upon which many a ship has
+laid her bones. This island is low and flat, and contains a greater
+depth of soil than the others. At low tide, Cedar and Malaga are both
+connected with it,--the latter permanently by a breakwater,--the whole
+comprising about one hundred acres. Star Island contains one hundred
+and fifty acres, and lies a quarter of a mile southwest of Smutty-nose.
+Toward its northern end are clustered the houses of the little village
+of Gosport, with a tiny church crowning the highest rock. Not quite
+a mile southwest from Star, White Island lifts a lighthouse for a
+warning. This is the most picturesque of the group, and forms, with
+Seavey’s Island, at low water, a double island, with an area of some
+twenty acres. Most westerly lies Londoner’s, an irregular rock with a
+bit of beach, upon which all the shells about the cluster seem to be
+thrown. Two miles northeast from Appledore, Duck Island thrusts out its
+lurking ledges on all sides beneath the water, one of them running half
+a mile to the northwest. This is the most dangerous of the islands,
+and, being the most remote, is the only one visited to any great degree
+by the shy sea-fowl that are nearly banished by civilization. Yet even
+now, at low tide, those long black ledges are often whitened by the
+dazzling plumage of gulls whose exquisite and stainless purity rivals
+the new-fallen snow. The ledges run toward the west and north; but
+at the east and south the shore is bolder, and Shag and Mingo Rocks,
+where, during or after storms, the sea breaks with magnificent effect,
+lie isolated by a narrow channel from the main granite fragment. A
+very round rock west of Londoner’s, perversely called “Square,” and
+Anderson’s Rock, off the southeast end of Smutty-nose, complete the
+catalogue.
+
+Smutty-nose and Appledore are almost united by a reef, bare at low
+tide, though a large vessel can pass between them even then. Off the
+landing at White Island the Devil’s Rock rolls an incessant breaker,
+and makes an attempt to reach the shore perilous in any but the
+serenest weather. Between Londoner’s and Star is another, hardly bare
+at low tide; a perpetual danger, for it lies directly in the path of
+most of the sailing vessels, and many a schooner has been “brought up
+all standing” by this unexpected obstacle. Another rock, about four
+miles east of Appledore, rejoices in the significant title of the “Old
+Harry.” Old Harry is deeply sunk beneath the surface, and never betrays
+himself except in great storms, when an awful white spray rises afar
+off, and the Shoalers know how tremendous are the breakers that send it
+skyward.
+
+The names of the towns, Appledore, Gosport, and, along the coast,
+Portsmouth, Newcastle, Rye, Ipswich, Portland, Bangor, Newbury,
+Amesbury, Salisbury, and many more, are all borrowed from towns on, or
+not far from, the coasts of England and Wales, as may be seen from the
+maps of those countries. Salisbury Beach fronts our islands. Amesbury
+lies farther inland, but the gentle outline of Po Hill, in that town,
+is the last eminence of any importance on the southern end of the coast
+line.
+
+The dividing line between Maine and New Hampshire passes through the
+group, giving Appledore, Smutty-nose, and Duck Islands to Maine, and
+the rest to New Hampshire; but their allegiance to either is a matter
+of small importance, the few inhabitants troubling themselves but
+little about what State they belong to. Till within a few years no
+taxes were required of them, and they enjoyed immunity from this and
+various other earthly ills as completely as the gulls and loons that
+shared their dwelling-place.
+
+Swept by every wind that blows, and beaten by the bitter brine for
+unknown ages, well may the Isles of Shoals be barren, bleak, and bare.
+At first sight nothing can be more rough and inhospitable than they
+appear. The incessant influences of wind and sun, rain, snow, frost,
+and spray, have so bleached the tops of the rocks, that they look
+hoary as if with age, though in the summer-time a gracious greenness
+of vegetation breaks here and there the stern outlines, and softens
+somewhat their rugged aspect. Yet so forbidding are their shores,
+it seems scarcely worth while to land upon them,--mere heaps of
+tumbling granite in the wide and lonely sea,--when all the smiling,
+“sapphire-spangled marriage-ring of the land” lies ready to woo the
+voyager back again, and welcome his returning prow with pleasant
+sights and sounds and scents that the wild wastes of water never know.
+But to the human creature who has eyes that will see and ears that will
+hear, nature appeals with such a novel charm, that the luxurious beauty
+of the land is half forgotten before one is aware. Its sweet gardens,
+full of color and perfume, its rich woods and softly swelling hills,
+its placid waters, and fields and flowery meadows, are no longer dear
+and desirable; for the wonderful sound of the sea dulls the memory
+of all past impressions, and seems to fulfil and satisfy all present
+needs. Landing for the first time, the stranger is struck only by the
+sadness of the place,--the vast loneliness; for there are not even
+trees to whisper with familiar voices,--nothing but sky and sea and
+rocks. But the very wildness and desolation reveal a strange beauty to
+him. Let him wait till evening comes,
+
+              “With sunset purple soothing all the waste,”
+
+and he will find himself slowly succumbing to the subtile charm of that
+sea atmosphere. He sleeps with all the waves of the Atlantic murmuring
+in his ears, and wakes to the freshness of a summer morning; and it
+seems as if morning were made for the first time. For the world is
+like a new-blown rose, and in the heart of it he stands, with only
+the caressing music of the water to break the utter silence, unless,
+perhaps, a song-sparrow pours out its blissful warble like an embodied
+joy. The sea is rosy, and the sky; the line of land is radiant; the
+scattered sails glow with the delicious color that touches so tenderly
+the bare, bleak rocks. These are lovelier than sky or sea or distant
+sails, or graceful gulls’ wings reddened with the dawn; nothing takes
+color so beautifully as the bleached granite; the shadows are delicate,
+and the fine, hard outlines are glorified and softened beneath the
+fresh first blush of sunrise. All things are speckless and spotless;
+there is no dust, no noise, nothing but peace in the sweet air and
+on the quiet sea. The day goes on; the rose changes to mellow gold,
+the gold to clear, white daylight, and the sea is sparkling again. A
+breeze ripples the surface, and wherever it touches the color deepens.
+A seine-boat passes, with the tawny net heaped in the stern, and the
+scarlet shirts of the rowers brilliant against the blue. Pleasantly
+their voices come across the water, breaking the stillness. The
+fishing-boats steal to and fro, silent, with glittering sails; the
+gulls wheel lazily; the far-off coasters glide rapidly along the
+horizon; the mirage steals down the coast-line, and seems to remove it
+leagues away. And what if it were to slip down the slope of the world
+and disappear entirely? You think, in a half-dream, you would not care.
+Many troubles, cares, perplexities, vexations, lurk behind that far,
+faint line for you. Why should you be bothered any more?
+
+               “Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
+               And in a little while our lips are dumb.”
+
+And so the waves, with their lulling murmur, do their work, and you are
+soothed into repose and transient forgetfulness.
+
+The natives, or persons who have been brought up here, find it almost
+as difficult to tear themselves away from the islands as do the Swiss
+to leave their mountains. From a civilized race’s point of view, this
+is a curious instance of human perversity, since it is not good for
+men to live their whole lives through in such remote and solitary
+places. Nobody hears of people dying of homesickness for New York, or
+Albany, or Maine, or California, or any place on the broad continent;
+but to wild and lonely spots like these isles humanity clings with
+an intense and abiding affection. No other place is able to furnish
+the inhabitants of the Shoals with sufficient air for their capacious
+lungs; there is never scope enough elsewhere; there is no horizon;
+they must have sea-room. On shore it is to them as if all the trees
+and houses crowded against the windows to suffocation; and I know a
+youth who, when at the age of thirteen he made his first visit to
+the mainland, descended to the cellar of the house in which he found
+himself, in the not over-populous city of Portsmouth, and spent the few
+hours of his stay sitting dejectedly upon a wood-pile, in mute protest
+against the condition of things in general, and the pressure of human
+society in particular.
+
+Each island has its peculiar characteristics, as I said before, and no
+two are alike, though all are of the same coarse granite, mixed with
+masses and seams of quartz and feldspar and gneiss and mica-slate,
+and interspersed with dikes of trap running in all directions. Upon
+Appledore, for the most part, the trap runs from north to south, while
+the veins of quartz and feldspar run from east to west. Sometimes the
+narrow white quartz veins intersect the dark trap, in parallel lines,
+now wavering, and now perfectly straight, and showing a surface like
+that of some vast piece of inlaid work. Each island presents its
+boldest shore to the east, to breast the whole force of the great
+Atlantic, which every year assails the iron cliffs and headlands with
+the same ponderous fury, yet leaves upon them so little trace of its
+immense power,--though at White Island, on the top of a precipitous
+rock called “The Head,” which is nearly fifty feet high, lies a bowlder
+weighing fifteen tons, tossed there from below by the breakers. The
+shores are seldom very bold, but on the east they are often very
+striking with their rifts and chasms, and roughly piled gorges, and
+square quarries of stone, and stairways cut as if by human hands.
+The trap rock, softer than the granite, is worn away in many places,
+leaving bare perpendicular walls fifteen or twenty feet high. The
+largest trap dike upon Appledore runs across the island from northeast
+to southwest, disappears in the sea, and reappears upon Smutty-nose,
+a quarter of a mile distant in a straight line. In some places, the
+geologist will tell you, certain deep scratches in the solid rock
+mean that here the glacier ground its way across in the world’s
+earlier ages. Frequently the trap rock is honeycombed in a curious
+fashion,--filled with small holes on the surface, as if drops of
+water falling for years in the same spots had worn these smooth round
+hollows. This always happens close to the water, and only in the trap
+rock, and looks as if it might be the result of the flying spray which,
+in winter and toward spring, when the northwest gales blow sometimes
+for three weeks steadily day and night, beats continually upon the
+shore.
+
+[Illustration: TRAP DIKE, APPLEDORE.]
+
+The coast-line varies, of course, with high or low tide. At low water
+the shores are much more forbidding than at high tide, for a broad band
+of dark sea-weed girdles each island, and gives a sullen aspect to the
+whole group. But in calm days, when the moon is full and the tides are
+so low that it sometimes seems as if the sea were being drained away on
+purpose to show to eager eyes what lies beneath the lowest ebb, banks
+of golden green and brown moss thickly clustered on the moist ledges
+are exposed, and the water is cut by the ruffled edges of the kelps
+that grow in brown and shining forests on every side. At sunrise or
+sunset the effect of the long rays slanting across these masses of rich
+color is very beautiful. But at high tide the shores are most charming;
+every little cove and inlet is filled with the music of the waves,
+and their life, light, color, and sparkle. Who shall describe that
+wonderful noise of the sea among the rocks, to me the most suggestive
+of all the sounds in nature? Each island, every isolated rock, has its
+own peculiar rote, and ears made delicate by listening, in great and
+frequent peril, can distinguish the bearings of each in a dense fog.
+The threatening speech of Duck Island’s ledges, the swing of the wave
+over Halfway Rock, the touch of the ripples on the beach at Londoner’s,
+the long and lazy breaker that is forever rolling below the lighthouse
+at White Island,--all are familiar and distinct, and indicate to the
+islander his whereabouts almost as clearly as if the sun shone brightly
+and no shrouding mist were striving to mock and to mislead him.
+
+There are no beaches of any considerable size along the circle of
+these shores, and except in two narrow fissures, one on Malaga and
+one on Star, only a few feet wide at their widest, there is no fine,
+clean sand, such as lies sparkling on the coast at Rye, opposite, and
+shows, faintly glimmering, white in the far distance. The dock at
+Smutty-nose is filled with coarse sand and mud, like the little basin
+of the “Upper Cove” on Appledore; and the largest beach on Star, of
+the same character, is covered with a stratum of fish-bones several
+feet deep,--by no means a pleasantly fragrant pavement. Roughly
+rounded pebbles, not beautiful with warmth of color like those on the
+Cohasset beaches, but a cold, hard combination of gray granite and
+dark trap, are heaped in the coves. Indian arrowheads of jasper and
+flint have been found among them. Now and then a smoother bit consists
+of a coarse gravel, which, if you examine, you will find to be
+principally composed of shells ground fine by the waves, a fascinating
+mixture of blue and purple mussels, lined with the rainbow tints of
+mother-of-pearl, and fragments of golden and ruddy snail-shells, and
+striped and colored cockles; with here and there a piece of transparent
+quartz, white or rosy, or of opaque feldspar, faintly straw-colored,
+or of dull-purple porphyry stone, all clean and moist with the
+odorous brine. Upon Appledore and the little islets undevastated by
+civilization these tiny coves are the most delightful places in the
+world, lovely with their fringe of weeds, thistles, and mullein-stalks
+drawn clearly against the sky at the upper edge of the slope, and
+below, their mosaic of stone and shell and sea-wrack, tangles of kelp
+and driftwood,--a mass of warm neutral tints,--with brown, green, and
+crimson mosses, and a few golden snail-shells lying on the many-tinted
+gravel, where the indolent ripples lapse in delicious murmurs. There
+are few shells more delicate than the variegated snails and cockles
+and stout whelks that sparsely strew the beaches, but these few are
+exceedingly beautiful, and more precious from their rarity. Two kinds
+of pure white spiral shells, not quite an inch long, are occasionally
+found, and cause one to wonder how they can be rolled together with the
+heavy pebbles by the breakers and not be annihilated.
+
+After the dark blue mussel-shells have lain long on shore in sun and
+rain, they take a curious satin sheen, lovely to behold, and the
+larger kind, shedding their coat of brown varnish, are colored like
+the eastern sky in clear winter sunsets, a rosy purple, with pearly
+linings streaked with iridescent hues. The driftwood is always full
+of suggestions:--a broken oar; a bit of spar with a ragged end of
+rope-yarn attached; a section of a mast hurriedly chopped, telling
+of a tragedy too well known on the awful sea; a water-worn buoy, or
+flakes of rich brown bark, which have been peacefully floated down
+the rivers of Maine and out on the wide sea, to land at last here
+and gladden firesides so remote from the deep green wood where they
+grew; pine-cones, with their spicy fragrance yet lingering about
+them; apples, green spruce twigs, a shingle, with some carpenter’s
+half-obliterated calculations pencilled upon it; a child’s roughly
+carved boat; drowned butterflies, beetles, birds; dead boughs of ragged
+fir-trees completely draped with the long, shining ribbon-grass that
+grows in brackish water near river mouths. The last, after lying awhile
+in the wind and sun, present a weird appearance, for the narrow ribbons
+are dried and bleached as white as chalk, and shiver and shudder with
+every wind that blows. It used to be a great delight to hold such a
+bough aloft, and watch all the long, delicate pennons and streamers
+fly trembling out on the breeze. Beyond high-water mark all things
+in the course of time take a uniform gray color from the weather;
+wood, shells, stones, deposited by some great tide or storm, and left
+undisturbed for months, chocolate-colored bark and yellow shingle and
+gray stone are not to be distinguished one from another, except by
+their shape. Of course all white things grow whiter, and shells already
+colorless become as pure as snow. Sometimes the slabs and blocks of
+wood that float ashore have drifted so long that they are water-logged,
+and covered with a rich growth of mosses, barnacles, and wondrous
+sea-creatures. Sometimes they are completely riddled by the pholas, and
+the hardest shells are pierced smoothly through and through by these
+soft worms.
+
+But as a child I was never without apprehension when examining the
+drift, for I feared to find some too dreadful token of disaster. After
+the steamer Bohemian was wrecked (off Halifax, I think) a few years
+ago, bales of her costly cargo of silks and rich stuffs and pieces
+of the wreck were strewn along the coast even to Cape Ann; and upon
+Rye Beach, among other things, two boots came on shore. They were not
+mates, and each contained a human foot. That must have been a grewsome
+discovery to him who picked them up.
+
+There are not many of these quiet coves. In general a confusion reigns
+as if an earthquake had rent and split the coasts, and tumbled the
+masses in chaotic heaps. On Appledore and the larger islands the
+interior is rather smoother, though nowhere will you find many rods
+of plain walking. Slopes of greenness alternate with the long white
+ledges, and here and there are bits of swampy ground and little
+valleys where the turf is short, and the sheep love to browse, and
+the mushrooms grow in August and September. There are no trees
+except, perhaps, a few balm-of-gilead trees on Star and a small elm
+on Appledore, which has been struggling with the bleakness of the
+situation some twenty years. It is very probable that the islands were
+wooded many years ago with spruce and pine perhaps,--a rugged growth.
+I am certain that cedars grew there, for I found on the highest part
+of Smutty-nose Point, deep down in a crevice in the rocks, a piece of
+a root of cedar-wood, which, though perfectly preserved, bore marks of
+great age, being worn as smooth as glass with the raindrops that had
+penetrated to its hiding-place. There are a few bushes, browsed down
+by the sheep, with maple, poplar, and birch leaves; and I have seen
+the crumbling remains of the stump of some large tree in the principal
+gorge or valley at Appledore. The oldest inhabitants remember quite an
+orchard on Smutty-nose. In the following note (for which I am indebted
+to Mr. T. B. Fox) from “Christopher Leavitt’s Voyage into New England”
+in the year 1623, it appears that there were trees, though not of the
+kind the voyagers wished to see. He says: “The first place I set my
+foot upon in New England was the Isles of Shoulds. We could see not
+one good timber tree, or so much good ground as to make a garden. Good
+fishing-place for six ships,” he goes on to say, “not more for want of
+good storage rooms. Harbor indifferent good. No savages at all.” That
+was two hundred and forty-six years ago. In the Rev. Jedediah Morse’s
+journal of a mission to the Shoals in August, 1800, he says, referring
+to the wretched state of the inhabitants of Star Island at that time,
+“All the trees, and the bushes even, have been consumed, and they have
+cut up, dried, and burned many acres of the sward, leaving only naked
+rocks where formerly there was the finest pasturage for cows.” The
+bushes have never grown again on Star; but Appledore, wherever there is
+soil enough to hold a root, is overgrown with huckleberry and bayberry
+bushes, the glossy green leaves of the latter yielding a wholesome,
+aromatic fragrance, which accords well with the fresh and healthy
+sea-odors. Blackberry, raspberry, wild currant, and gooseberry bushes
+also flourish; there are clumps of elder and sumach, woodbine and the
+poison ivy, shrubs of wild-cherry and shadbush, and even one little
+wild apple-tree that yearly bears a few large, bright blossoms.
+
+It is curious to note the varieties of plants, wild-flowers, and
+grasses on this island alone. There are six different ferns, and many
+delicate flowers bloom in the spring, whose faces it is a continual
+surprise to find looking up at you from the rough ground, among the
+rocks. Every flower seems twice as beautiful under these circumstances;
+and it is a fact that the salt air and a peculiar richness in the soil
+give a luxuriance of growth and a depth of color not found elsewhere.
+“Is that willow-weed” (or whatever it may be)? “I never saw any so
+bright!” is a remark often heard from strangers visiting the islands
+for the first time. The pale-pink herb-robert, for instance, blushes
+with a tint almost as deep as a damask rose, and as for the wild-roses,
+I heard some one say they were as “bright as red carnations.” In the
+spring the anemones are stained with purple and pink and yellow in a
+way that makes their sisters of the mainland seem pallid beside them;
+and the violets are wonderful,--the blue ones so large and dark, and
+the delicately-veined white ones rich with creamy fragrance.
+
+The calyx of the shadbush-flower is dyed with purple, almost crimson,
+and the color runs into the milky whiteness of the petals. The little
+pimpernel (when it has anything but salt gravel to grow in, for it
+runs fairly into the sea) is clear vermilion, and the pearly eyebright
+is violet on the edges; the shy celandine glows golden in its shady
+clefts, and the spotted jewel-weed is as rich and splendid as a flower
+in Doctor Rappacini’s famous garden. Sometimes it is as if the order
+of nature were set aside in this spot; for you find the eyebright and
+pimpernel and white violets growing side by side until the frost comes
+in November; often October passes with no sign of frost, and the autumn
+lingers later than elsewhere. I have even seen the iris and wild-rose
+and golden-rod and aster in blossom together, as if, not having the
+example of the world before their eyes, they followed their own sweet
+will, and bloomed when they took the fancy. As for garden flowers, when
+you plant them in this soil they fairly run mad with color. People
+say, “Do give me some seeds of these wonderful flowers”; and they
+sow them in their gardens on the mainland, and they come up decorous,
+commonplace, and pale, like their sisters in the same soil. The little
+spot of earth on which they grow at the island is like a mass of
+jewels. Who shall describe the pansies, richly streaked with burning
+gold; the dark velvet coreopsis and the nasturtium; the larkspurs, blue
+and brilliant as lapis-lazuli; the “ardent marigolds,” that flame like
+mimic suns? The sweet-peas are of a deep, bright rose-color, and their
+odor is like rich wine, too sweet almost to be borne, except when the
+pure fragrance of mignonette is added,--such mignonette as never grows
+on shore. Why should the poppies blaze in such imperial scarlet? What
+quality is hidden in this thin soil, which so transfigures all the
+familiar flowers with fresh beauty? I have heard it said that it is the
+crumbled rock which so enriches the earth, but I do not know.
+
+If a flock of sheep and various cows did not browse over Appledore
+incessantly, it would be a little wilderness of wild-flowers in the
+summer; they love the soil and climate, and put forth all their
+strength and loveliness. And every year or two a new kind appears, of
+which the seed has been brought by some bird, or, perhaps, shaken
+out of a bundle of hay. Last summer, for the first time, I found the
+purple polygala growing in a meadowy piece of turf on the south side
+of the island. Columbines and the fragrant ground-nut, helianthus, and
+various other plants, grow only on Duck Island; and it is singular
+that the little potentilla, which I am told grows elsewhere only on
+mountain-sides, is found here on all the islands. At Smutty-nose
+alone certain plants of the wicked-looking henbane (_Hyoscyamus
+niger_) flourish, and, on Londoner’s only, there spreads at the top
+of the beach a large sea-lungwort (_Mertensia maritima_). At Star the
+crooked little ways between the houses are lined with tall plants of
+the poisonous hemlock (the _Conium_ that made the death-draught of
+Socrates), which flourishes amain, and is the only green thing out of
+the small walled enclosures, except the grass and the burdocks; for the
+cows and the children devastate the ground.
+
+Appledore is altogether the most agreeable in its aspect of all the
+islands, being the largest, and having a greater variety of surface
+than the rest. Its southern portion is full of interest, from the
+traces of vanished humanity which one beholds at every step; for the
+ground in some places is undermined with ancient graves, and the ruined
+cellars of houses wherein men and women lived more than a century ago
+are scattered here and there to the number of seventy and more. The
+men and women are dust and ashes; but here are the stones they squared
+and laid; here are the thresholds over which so many feet have passed.
+The pale green and lilac and golden lichens have overgrown and effaced
+all traces of their footsteps on the door-stones; but here they passed
+in and out,--old and young, little feet of children, heavy tramp of
+stalwart fishermen, lighter tread of women, painful and uncertain steps
+of age. Pleasant it is to think of the brown and swarthy fisherman,
+the father, standing on such a threshold, and with the keen glance all
+seafaring men possess sweeping the wide horizon for signs of fair or
+foul weather; or the mother, sitting in the sun on the step, nursing
+her baby, perhaps, or mending a net, or spinning,--for the women here
+were famous spinners, and on Star Island yet are women who have not
+forgotten the art. Pleasanter still to think of some slender girl at
+twilight lingering with reluctant feet, and wistful eyes that search
+the dusky sea for a returning sail whose glimmer is sweeter than
+moonlight or starlight to her sight,--lingering still, though her
+mother calls within and the dew falls with the falling night. I love
+to people these solitudes again, and think that those who lived here
+centuries ago were decent, God-fearing folk, most of them,--for so
+tradition says;[A] though in later years they fell into evil ways, and
+drank “fire-water,” and came to grief. And all the pictures over which
+I dream are set in this framework of the sea, that sparkled and sang,
+or frowned and threatened, in the ages that are gone as it does to-day,
+and will continue to smile and threaten when we who listen to it and
+love it and fear it now are dust and ashes in our turn.
+
+[A] “The character and habits of the original settlers for industry,
+intelligence, and pure morals have acquired for them great respect in
+the estimation of posterity.”--_Williamson’s History of Maine._
+
+Some of the cellars are double, as if two families had built together;
+some are distinctly marked; in others the stones have partly fallen
+in; all are more or less overgrown with lichens, and thick, short turf
+creeps everywhere in and about them. Sometimes garlands of woodbine
+drape the walls, and poison-ivy clasps and knots itself about the
+rocks; clumps of sweet flowering-elder cluster in the corners, or
+graceful, stag-horned sumachs, or raspberry bushes with ruddy fruit.
+Wild spiked thistles spread, and tall mullein-stalks stand like
+sentinels on guard over the desolation. Beautiful it is to see the
+delicate herb-robert’s rosy flowers among the rough heaps of rocks,
+like a tender afterthought where all is hard and stern.
+
+It is a part of the religious belief of the Shoalers, that the ruinous
+cairn on the summit of Appledore was built by the famous John Smith
+and his men when they discovered the islands in the year 1614; and I
+will not be so heretical as to doubt the fact, though it seems just as
+likely that it was set up by fishermen and sailors as a landmark. At
+any rate, nobody knows when it was not there, and it is perfectly safe
+to imagine any origin for it. I never could be precisely certain of the
+site of the first meeting-house on this island, “built (of brick) at a
+very early period, possibly the first in the province,” says Williamson
+in his “History of Maine.” Probably there was no cellar beneath it, and
+the slight underpinning has been scattered and obliterated by time,--a
+fate which many of the houses must have shared in like manner. When man
+has vanished, Nature strives to restore her original order of things,
+and she smooths away gradually all traces of his work with the broad
+hands of her changing seasons. The men who built the Pyramids felt
+this; but will not the world spin long enough to level their masonry
+with the desolate sands? Neither is there any sign of the foundation
+of that “Academy” to which “even gentlemen from some of the principal
+towns on the sea-coast sent their sons for literary instruction,”--I
+quote again from Williamson. How like a dream it seems, looking now at
+these deserted rocks, that so much happened here in the years that are
+gone! The connection of Spain with these islands always had a great
+fascination for me; it is curious that the brightest and gayest of
+lands, all aglow with sunshine and so rich with southern beauty, should
+be in any way linked with this place, so remote and desolate. “In 1730,
+and afterwards, three or four ships used to load at the Shoals with
+winter and spring merchantable fish for Bilboa in Spain.” What wondrous
+craft must have navigated these waters,--lazy, lumbering old ships,
+with quaintly carved figure-heads, and high-peaked sterns and prows,
+and heavy draperies of weather-beaten sails, picturesque and charming
+to behold, and well enough for the sparkling Mediterranean, but not the
+sort of build to battle with the Atlantic breakers, as several wrecks
+of vessels caught in the terrible gales and driven upon the pitiless
+ledges might testify! The ship Sagunto, it is said, met her destruction
+here as late as the year 1813; and there are faint echoes of other
+disasters of the kind, but the names of other ships have not come down
+to us. One wrecked on Appledore left only a quantity of broad silver
+pieces sprinkled about the rocks to tell of the calamity. A fisherman
+from Star, paddling over in his dory to explore the coves and chasms
+for driftwood (for the island was uninhabited at the time), came
+suddenly upon the glittering coins. His amazement was boundless. After
+filling his pockets, a sudden terror possessed him; he began to have
+a suspicion that something uncanny lurked at the bottom of such good
+fortune (for the superstition of the natives is very great), and fled
+home to tell his neighbors, who came in a body and made short work of
+the process of gathering the rest of the treasure. Occasionally, since
+that time, coins have been found about the southeast point, whereon the
+unknown vessel struck and was completely destroyed. Of course Captain
+Kidd, “as he sailed,” is supposed to have made the locality one of his
+many hiding-places. I remember being awed when a child at the story
+of how a certain old black Dinah, an inhabitant of Portsmouth, came
+out to Appledore, then entirely divested of human abodes, and alone,
+with only a divining-rod for company, passed several days and nights
+wandering over the island, muttering to herself, with her divining-rod
+carefully balanced in her skinny hands. Robert Kidd’s buried treasure,
+if it existed, never signalled from below to that mystic rod, and the
+old negress returned empty-handed; but what a picture she must have
+made wandering there in the loneliness, by sunlight, or moonlight,
+or starlight, with her weird figure, her dark face, her garments
+fluttering in the wind, and the awful rod in her hand!
+
+On Star Island, I have been told, a little three-legged black pot
+full of gold and silver pieces was dug up not very many years ago;
+and it is certainly true that Mr. Samuel Haley, who lived upon and
+owned Smutty-nose, in building a wall, turned over a large, flat stone
+beneath which lay four bars of solid silver. He must have been a fine,
+energetic old fellow, that Samuel Haley. With this treasure, says
+tradition again, he built, at great trouble and expense, the sea-wall
+which connects Smutty-nose with Malaga, and makes a safe harbor for
+distressed mariners in stormy weather. (This name Malaga, by the way,
+is a very distinct token of the Spaniards.) Not only did Haley build
+the sea-wall, but he erected salt-works which “manufactured excellent
+salt for the curing of fish,” and stretched a ropewalk over the
+uneven ground to the extent of two hundred and seventy feet, and set
+up windmills to catch with their wide wings all the winds that blew,
+that he might grind his own corn and wheat, and live as independently
+as possible of his fellow-men; for that is one of the first things a
+settler on the Isles of Shoals finds it necessary to learn. He planted
+a little orchard where the soil was deepest, and with much cherishing
+care contrived to coax his cherry-trees into abundant fruitfulness, and
+in every way made the most of the few advantages of the place. The old
+square house which he built upon his island, and which still stands,
+had, long ago, a broad balcony running the whole length of the house
+beneath the second-story windows. This being in a ruinous condition, I
+never dared venture out upon it; but a large, square lookout, with a
+stout railing, which he built on the top of the house, remained till
+within a few years; and I found it a charming place to linger in on
+still days, and watch the sky and the sea and the vessels, and the play
+of color over the bright face of the world. Looking from that airy
+station years ago, I used to think how many times he had sat there with
+his spy-glass, scanning the horizon and all within it, while the wind
+ruffled his gray hair and the sun shone pleasantly across his calm old
+face. Many years of his useful, happy life he lived there, and left
+behind him a beloved and honorable name. His descendants, still living
+upon Star, are among the best people in the village. A young girl
+bearing his name was lately married to one of the youthful fishermen.
+Star Island might well be proud of such a girl, so modest and sweet,
+and pretty too, slender and straight, dark-haired, brown-eyed,--as
+picturesque a creature as one would wish to see, with a delicate rose
+in her cheek and a clear light of intelligence in her eyes. Considering
+her, and remembering this ancient ancestor of hers, I thought she
+came honestly by her gentle, self-reliant expression, and her fine
+bearing, full of unconscious dignity and grace. The old man’s quaint
+epitaph speaks of his humanity in “receiving into his enclosure many
+a poor, distressed seaman and fisherman in distress of weather.” “In
+distress of weather!” One must live in such a place fully to comprehend
+the meaning of the words. It was his custom every night to put in
+his bedroom window, over the broad balcony facing the southeast, a
+light which burned all night,--a little act of thoughtfulness which
+speaks volumes. I think the lighthouse could not have been kindled at
+that time, but I am not sure. There is much uncertainty with regard
+to dates and records of those old times. Mr. Haley is said to have
+died in 1811, but I have always heard that he was living when the
+Sagunto was wrecked upon his island, which happened, according to the
+Gosport records, in 1813. This is the entry: “Ship Sagunto stranded
+on Smotinose Isle Jany 14^{th} 1813 Jany 15^{th} one man found, Jany
+16^{th} 6 men found 21--7 the Number of men yet found Belonging to
+said ship twelve.” I am inclined to think the writer made a mistake in
+his date as well as his spelling and arithmetic, for it is an accepted
+tradition that Mr. Haley found and buried the dead crew of that ship,
+and I have always heard it spoken of as a simple fact. On that stormy
+January night, runs the story, he placed the light as usual in his
+chamber window, and I dare say prayed in his good heart that no vessel
+might be wandering near this dangerous place, tossed helpless on the
+raging sea in the thick darkness and bitter cold and blinding snow. But
+that night the great ship Sagunto drove, crashing, full upon the fatal
+southeast point, in sight of the tiny spark that burned peacefully,
+unwavering, in that quiet chamber. Her costly timbers of mahogany and
+cedar-wood were splintered on the sharp teeth of those inexorable
+rocks; her cargo of dried fruits and nuts and bales of broadcloth and
+gold and silver, was tossed about the shore, and part of her crew were
+thrown alive upon it. Some of them saw the light, and crawled toward
+it benumbed with cold and spent with fatigue and terror. The roaring
+of the storm bore away their faint cries of distress; the old man
+slept on quietly, with his family about him, sheltered, safe; while a
+stone’s-throw from his door these sailors strove and agonized to reach
+that friendly light. Two of them gained the stone-wall in front of the
+house, but their ebbing strength would not allow them to climb over;
+they threw themselves upon it, and perished miserably, with safety,
+warmth, and comfort so close at hand! In the morning, when the tumult
+was somewhat hushed, and underneath the sullen sky rolled the more
+sullen sea in long, deliberate waves, the old man looked out in the
+early light across the waste of snow, and on the wall lay--something
+that broke the familiar outline, though all was smooth with the pure,
+soft snow. He must put on coat and cap, and go and find out what this
+strange thing might be. Ah, that was a sight for his pitying eyes under
+the cold and leaden light of that unrelenting morning! He summoned his
+sons and his men. Quickly the alarm was given, and there was confusion
+and excitement as the islanders, hurriedly gathering, tried if it were
+possible yet to save some life amid the wreck. But it was too late;
+every soul was lost. Fourteen bodies were found at that time, strewn
+all the way between the wall and that southeast point where the vessel
+had gone to pieces. The following summer the skeleton of another was
+discovered among some bushes near the shore. The imagination lingers
+over those poor drowned sailors; strives to figure what each man was
+like, what might have been the musical name of each (for all names in
+Spanish should be musical, with a reminiscence of flute and guitar in
+them); dwells on the dark-olive faces and jet-black hair, the graceful
+foreign dress,--curious short jackets, perhaps, with bits of bright
+embroidery that loving hands had worked for them, all stained and
+tarnished by the brine. No doubt some of them wore about their necks a
+cross or amulet, with an image of the “Blessed Virgin” or the “Son of
+God,” that so they might be saved from just such a fate as this; and
+maybe some one among these sailor-men carried against his heart a lock
+of hair, dark and lustrous before the washing of the cold waves dulled
+the brightness of its beauty. Fourteen shallow graves were quarried
+for the unknown dead in the iron earth, and there they lie, with him
+who buried them a little above in the same grassy slope. Here is his
+epitaph:--
+
+                     “In memory of Mr. Samuel Haley
+                       Who died in the year 1811
+                                Aged 84
+                    He was a man of great Ingenuity
+                Industry Honor and Honesty, true to his
+                    Country & A man who did A great
+                       Publik good in Building A
+                       Dock & Receiving into his
+                         Enclosure many a poor
+                     Distressed Seaman & Fisherman
+                        In distress of Weather.”
+
+A few steps from their resting-place the low wall on which the two
+unfortunates were found frozen is falling into ruin. The glossy green
+leaves of the bayberry-bushes crowd here and there about it, in odorous
+ranks on either side, and sweetly the warm blush of the wild-rose glows
+against its cool gray stones. Leaning upon it in summer afternoons,
+when the wind is quiet and there steals up a fragrance and fresh murmur
+from the incoming tide, when the slowly mellowing light lies tranquil
+over the placid sea, enriching everything it touches with infinite
+beauty,--waves and rocks that kill and destroy, blossoming roses and
+lonely graves,--a wistful sadness colors all one’s thoughts. Afar off
+the lazy waters sing and smile about that white point, shimmering
+in the brilliant atmosphere. How peaceful it is! How innocent and
+unconscious is the whole face of this awful and beautiful nature! But,
+listening to the blissful murmur of the tide, one can but think with
+what another voice that tide spoke when it ground the ship to atoms and
+roared with sullen thunder about those dying men.
+
+There is no inscription on the rough boulders at the head and foot
+of these graves. A few more years, and all trace of them will be
+obliterated. Already the stones lean this way and that, and are half
+buried in the rank grass. Soon will they be entirely forgotten; the
+old, old world forgets so much! And it is sown thick with graves from
+pole to pole.
+
+“These islands bore some of the first footprints of New-England
+Christianity and civilization. They were for a long time the abode of
+intelligence, refinement, and virtue, but were afterwards abandoned
+to a state of semi-barbarism.” The first intelligence of the place
+comes to us from the year 1614, when John Smith is supposed to have
+discovered them. The next date is of the landing of Christopher
+Leavitt, in 1623. In 1645, three brothers, Robert, John, and Richard
+Cutts, emigrated from Wales, and on their way to the continent paused
+at the Isles of Shoals, and, finding them so pleasant, made their
+settlement here. Williamson mentions particularly Richard Gibson,
+from Topsham, England, and various other men from England and Wales.
+Many people speedily joined the little colony, which grew yearly
+more prosperous. In 1650, the Rev. John Brock came to live among the
+islanders, and remained with them twelve years. All that we hear of
+this man is so fine, he is represented as having been so faithful,
+zealous, intelligent, and humane, that it is no wonder the community
+flourished while he sat at the helm. It was said of him, “He dwells as
+near Heaven as any man upon earth.” Cotton Mather thus quaintly praises
+him: “He was a good _grammarian_, chiefly in this, that he still _spoke
+the truth from his heart_. He was a good _logician_, chiefly in this,
+that he _presented himself unto God with a reasonable service_. He was
+a good _arithmetician_, chiefly in this, that he _so numbered his days
+as to apply his heart unto wisdom_. He was a good _astronomer_, chiefly
+in this, _that his conversation was in Heaven_.... So much belonged to
+this _good man_, that so _learned a life_ may well be judged worthy of
+being a _written one_.” After him came a long procession of the clergy,
+good, bad, and indifferent, up to the present time, when “divine
+service,” so-called, has seemed a mere burlesque as it has been often
+carried on in the little church at Star.
+
+Last summer I was shown a quaint little book entitled “The Fisherman’s
+Calling. A brief essay to Serve the Great Interests of Religion
+among our Fishermen. By Cotton Mather, D. D. Boston in New England.
+Printed: Sold by T. Green. 1712,” and I found the following incident
+connected with Mr. Brock’s ministry at the Shoals: “To Illustrate and
+Demonstrate the Providence of God our Saviour over the Business of
+fishermen, I will entertain you with Two short Modern Histories.” Then
+follows an account of some Romish priests upon some isles belonging to
+Scotland, who endeavored to draw the poor fishermen over to popery.
+The other is this: “When our Mr. Brock lived on the Isles of Shoals,
+he brought the Fishermen into an agreement that besides the Lord’s
+Day they would spend one day of every month together in the worship
+of the Glorious Lord. A certain day which by their Agreement belonged
+unto the Exercises of Religion being arrived, they came to Mr. Brock,
+and asked him, that they might put by their meeting and go a Fishing,
+because they had Lost many Days by the Foulness of the weather. He,
+seeing that without and against his consent they resolved upon doing
+what they asked of him, replied, ‘If you will go away I say unto you,
+‘Catch Fish if you can!’ But as for you that will tarry, and worship
+our Lord Jesus Christ this day, I will pray unto Him for you that you
+may afterwards take fish till you are weary.’ Thirty men went away
+from the meeting and Five tarried. The thirty that went away from the
+meeting with all their Craft could catch but four Fishes. The Five
+which tarried went forth afterwards and _they_ took _five Hundred_. The
+Fishermen were after this Readier to hearken unto the Voice of their
+Teacher.”
+
+If virtue were often its own reward after a fashion like this, in what
+a well-conducted world we should live! Doubtless the reckless islanders
+needed the force of all the moral suasion good Mr. Brock could bring
+to bear upon them; too much law and order they could not have; but I
+like better this story of the stout old fisherman who in church so
+unexpectedly answered his pastor’s thrilling exhortation, “Supposing,
+my brethren, that any of you should be overtaken in the bay by a
+northeast storm, your hearts trembling with fear, and nothing but death
+before, whither would your thoughts turn? what would you do?”--with the
+instant inspiration of common-sense, “I’d hoist the foresail and scud
+away for Squam!”
+
+The first church on Star was built principally of timbers from the
+wrecks of Spanish ships, but it has been partially burned and rebuilt
+twice. Various rough characters, given over to hard drinking, and
+consequently lawless living, have joined the colony within the last ten
+years, and made the place the scene of continually recurring fires. On
+going down to Appledore one spring I was surprised at the daily and
+nightly jangling of the dull bell at Star,--a dissonant sound borne
+wildly on the stormy wind to our dwelling. “What is Star Island ringing
+for?” I kept asking, and was as often answered, “O, it’s only Sam Blake
+setting his house on fire!”--the object being to obtain the insurance
+thereupon.
+
+On the Massachusetts records there is a paragraph to the effect that,
+in the year 1653, Philip Babb, of Hog Island, was appointed constable
+for all the islands of Shoals, Star Island excepted. To Philip Babb we
+shall have occasion to refer again. “In May, 1661,” says Williamson,
+“being places of note and great resort, the General Court incorporated
+the islands into a town called Appledore, and invested it with the
+powers and privileges of other towns.” There were then about forty
+families on Hog Island, but between that time and the year 1670 these
+removed to Star Island and joined the settlement there. This they were
+induced to do partly through fear of the Indians, who frequented Duck
+Island, and thence made plundering excursions upon them, carrying
+off their women while they were absent fishing, and doing a variety
+of harm; but, as it is expressly stated that people living on the
+mainland sent their children to school at Appledore that they might
+be safe from the Indians, the statement of their depredations at the
+Shoals is perplexing. Probably the savages camped on Duck to carry on
+their craft of porpoise-fishing, which to this day they still pursue
+among the islands on the eastern coast of Maine. Star Island seemed
+a place of greater safety; and probably the greater advantages of
+landing and the convenience of a wide cove at the entrance of the
+village, with a little harbor wherein the fishing-craft might anchor
+with some security, were also inducements. William Pepperell, a native
+of Cornwall, England, emigrated to the place in the year 1676, and
+lived there upwards of twenty years, and carried on a large fishery.
+“He was the father of Sir William Pepperell, the most famous man Maine
+ever produced.” For more than a century previous to the Revolutionary
+War there were at the Shoals from three to six hundred inhabitants,
+and the little settlement flourished steadily. They had their church
+and school-house, and a court-house; and the usual municipal officers
+were annually chosen, and the town records regularly kept. From three
+to four thousand quintals of fish were yearly caught and cured by the
+islanders; and, beside their trade with Spain, large quantities of fish
+were also carried to Portsmouth, for the West India market. In 1671
+the islands belonged to John Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges. This
+man always greatly interested me. He must have been a person of great
+force of character, strong, clear-headed, full of fire and energy. He
+was appointed governor-general of New England in 1637. Williamson has
+much to say of him: “He and Sir Walter Raleigh, whose acquaintance
+was familiar, possessing minds equally elastic and adventurous,
+turned their thoughts at an early period of life towards the American
+hemisphere.” And the historian thus goes on lamenting over him: “Fame
+and wealth, so often the idols of superior intellects, were the
+prominent objects of this aspiring man. Constant and sincere in his
+friendships, he might have had extensively the estimation of others,
+had not selfishness been the centre of all his efforts. His life and
+name, though by no means free from blemishes, have just claims to the
+grateful recollections of the Eastern Americans and their posterity.”
+
+From 1640 to 1775, says a report to the “Society for Propagating the
+Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America,” the church at
+the Shoals was in a flourishing condition, and had a succession of
+ministers,--Messrs. Hull, Brock, Belcher, Moody, Tucke, and Shaw, all
+of whom were good and faithful men; two, Brock and Tucke, being men
+of learning and ability, with peculiarities of talent and character
+admirably fitting them for their work on these islands. Tucke was
+the only one who closed his life and ministry at the Shoals. He was
+a graduate of Harvard College of the class of 1723, was ordained
+at the Shoals July 20, 1732, and died there August 12, 1773,--his
+ministry thus covering more than forty years. His salary in 1771 was
+paid in merchantable fish, a quintal to a man, when there were on
+the Shoals from ninety to one hundred men, and a quintal of fish was
+worth a guinea. His grave was accidentally discovered in 1800, and
+the Hon. Dudley Atkins Tyng, who interested himself most charitably
+and indefatigably for the good of these islands, placed over it a
+slab of stone, with an inscription which still remains to tell of the
+fine qualities of the man whose dust it covers; but year by year the
+raindrops with delicate touches wear away the deeply cut letters, for
+the stone lies horizontal; even now they are scarcely legible, and soon
+the words of praise and appreciation will exist only in the memory of
+a few of the older inhabitants.
+
+At the time of Mr. Tucke’s death the prosperity of the Shoals was at
+its height. But in less than thirty years after his death a most woful
+condition of things was inaugurated.
+
+The settlement flourished till the breaking out of the war, when it
+was found to be entirely at the mercy of the English, and obliged
+to furnish them with recruits and supplies. The inhabitants were
+therefore ordered by the government to quit the islands; and as their
+trade was probably broken up and their property exposed, most of them
+complied with the order, and settled in the neighboring seaport towns,
+where their descendants may be found to this day. Some of the people
+settled in Salem, and the Mr. White so mysteriously murdered there
+many years ago was born at Appledore. Those who remained, with a few
+exceptions, were among the most ignorant and degraded of the people,
+and they went rapidly down into untold depths of misery. “They burned
+the meeting-house, and gave themselves up to quarrelling, profanity,
+and drunkenness, till they became almost barbarians”; or, as Mr.
+Morse expresses it, “were given up to work all manner of wickedness
+with greediness.” In no place of the size has there been a greater
+absorption of “rum” since the world was made. Mr. Reuben Moody, a
+theological student, lived at the Shoals for a few months in the year
+1822, and his description of the condition of things at that time is
+frightful. He had no place to open a school; one of the islanders
+provided him with a room, fire, etc., giving as a reason for his
+enthusiastic furtherance of Mr. Moody’s plans, that his children made
+such a disturbance at home that he couldn’t sleep in the daytime. An
+extract from Mr. Moody’s journal affords an idea of the morals of the
+inhabitants at this period:--
+
+“May 1^{st}. I yet continue to witness the Heaven-daring impieties
+of this people. Yesterday my heart was shocked at seeing a man about
+seventy years of age, as devoid of reason as a maniac, giving way to
+his passions; striving to express himself in more blasphemous language
+than he had the ability to utter; and, being unable to express the
+malice of his heart in words, he would _run at_ every one he saw. All
+was tumult and confusion,--men and women with tar-brushes, clenched
+fists, and stones; one female who had an infant but eight days old,
+with a stone in her hand and an oath on her tongue, threatened to dash
+out the brains of her antagonists.... After I arrived among them some
+of them dispersed, some led their wives into the house, others drove
+them off, and a calm succeeded.”
+
+In another part of the journal is an account of an old man who lived
+alone and drank forty gallons of rum in twelve months,--some horrible
+old Caliban, no doubt. This hideous madness of drunkenness was the
+great trouble at the Shoals; and though time has modified, it has
+not eliminated the apparently hereditary bane whose antidote is not
+yet discovered. The misuse of strong drink still proves a whirlpool
+more awful than the worst terrors of the pitiless ocean that hems the
+islanders in.
+
+As may be seen from Mr. Moody’s journal, the clergy had a hard time
+of it among the heathen at the Isles of Shoals; but they persevered,
+and many brave women at different times have gone among the people to
+teach the school and reclaim the little children from wretchedness
+and ignorance. Miss Peabody, of Newburyport, who came to live with
+them in 1823, did wonders for them during the three years of her stay.
+She taught the school, visited the families, and on Sundays read to
+such audiences as she could collect, took seven of the poorer female
+children to live with her at the parsonage, instructed all who would
+learn in the arts of carding, spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing,
+braiding mats, etc. Truly she remembered what “Satan finds for idle
+hands to do,” and kept all her charges busy and consequently happy.
+All honor to her memory! she was a wise and faithful servant. There is
+still an affectionate remembrance of her among the present inhabitants,
+whose mothers she helped out of their degradation into a better life. I
+saw in one of the houses, not long ago, a sampler blackened by age, but
+carefully preserved in a frame; and was told that the dead grandmother
+of the family had made it when a little girl, under Miss Peabody’s
+supervision. In 1835 the Rev. Origen Smith went to live at Star, and
+remained perhaps ten years, doing much good among the people. He nearly
+succeeded in banishing the great demoralizer, liquor, and restored law
+and order. He is reverently remembered by the islanders. In 1855 an
+excellent man by the name of Mason occupied the post of minister for
+the islanders, and from his report to the “Society for Propagating the
+Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America” I make a few
+extracts. He says: “The kind of business which the people pursue, and
+by which they subsist, affects unfavorably their habits, physical,
+social, and religious. Family discipline is neglected, domestic
+arrangements very imperfect, much time, apparently wasted, is spent
+in watching for favorable indications to pursue their calling.... A
+bad moral influence is excited by a portion of the transient visitors
+to the Shoals during the summer months.” This is very true. He speaks
+of the people’s appreciation of the efforts made in their behalf; and
+says that they raised subscriptions among themselves for lighting the
+parsonage, and for fuel for the singing-school (which, by the way, was
+a most excellent institution), and mentions their surprising him by
+putting into the back kitchen of the parsonage a barrel of fine flour,
+a bucket of sugar, a leg of bacon, etc. “Their deep poverty abounded
+unto the riches of their liberality,” he says; and this little act
+shows that they were far from being indifferent or ungrateful. They
+were really attached to Mr. Mason, and it is a pity he could not have
+remained with them.
+
+Within the last few years they have been trying bravely to help
+themselves, and they persevere with their annual fair to obtain
+money to pay the teacher who saves their little children from utter
+ignorance; and many of them show a growing ambition in fitting up
+their houses and making their families more comfortable. Of late, the
+fires before referred to, kindled in drunken madness by the islanders
+themselves, or by the reckless few who have joined the settlement,
+have swept away nearly all the old houses, which have been replaced by
+smart new buildings, painted white, with green blinds, and with modern
+improvements, so that yearly the village grows less picturesque,--which
+is a charm one can afford to lose, when the external smartness is
+indicative of better living among the people. Twenty years ago Star
+Island Cove was charming, with its tumble-down fish-houses, and ancient
+cottages with low, shelving roofs, and porches covered with the golden
+lichen that so loves to embroider old weather-worn wood. Now there
+is not a vestige of those dilapidated buildings to be seen; almost
+everything is white and square and new; and they have even cleaned out
+the cove, and removed the great accumulation of fish-bones which made
+the beach so curious.
+
+The old town records are quaint and interesting, and the spelling and
+modes of expression so peculiar that I have copied a few. Mr. John
+Muchamore was the moderator of a meeting called “March ye 7th day,
+1748. By a Legall town meeting of ye Free holders and Inhabitence of
+gosport, dewly quallefide to vote for Tiding men Collers of fish,
+Corders of wood. Addition to ye minister’s sallery Mr John Tucke, 100
+lbs old tenor.”
+
+In 1755, it was “Agred in town meating that if any person shall spelth
+[split] any fish above hie water marck and leave their heads and son
+bones [sound-bones] their, shall pay ten lbs new tenor to the town, and
+any that is above now their, they that have them their, shall have them
+below hie warter in fortinets time or pay the same.” In another place
+“it is agreed at ton meating evry person that is are kow [has a cow]
+shall carry them of at 15 day of may, keep them their til the 15 day of
+October or pay 20 shillings lawful money.” And “if any person that have
+any hogs, If they do any damg, hom [whom] they do the damg to shall
+keep the hog for sattisfaxeon.”
+
+The cows seem to have given a great deal of trouble. Here is one more
+extract on the subject:--
+
+“This is a Leagel vot by the ton meeting, that if any presson or
+pressons shall leave their Cowks out after the fifteenth day of May
+and they do any Dameg, they shall be taken up and the owner of the kow
+shall pay teen shillings old tenor to the kow constabel and one half he
+shall have and the other shall give to the pour of the place.
+
+                              “MR DAINEL RANDEL
+                                “_Kow Constabel_.”
+
+“On March 11^{th} 1762. A genarel free Voot past amongst the inhabents
+that every fall of the year when Mr Rev^{d.} John Tucke has his wood to
+Carry home evary men will not com that is abel to com shall pay forty
+shillings ould tenor.”
+
+But the most delightfully preposterous entry is this:--
+
+“March 12^{th} 1769. A genarel free voot past amongst the inhabents to
+cus [cause] tow men to go to the Rev^d Mr John Tucke to hear wether he
+was willing to take one Quental of fish each man, or to take the price
+of Quental in ould tenor which he answered this that he thought it was
+easer to pay the fish than the money which he consented to taik the
+fish for the year insuing.”
+
+“On March ye 25 1771. ”then their was a meating called and it was
+_gurned_ until the 23^{rd} day of apirel.
+
+                     “MR DEEKEN WILLAM MUCHMORE
+                                    “_Moderator_.”
+
+Among the “offorsers” of “Gospored” were, besides “Moderator” and “Town
+Clarke,” “Seelekt meen,” “Counstauble,” “Tidon meen” (Tithing-men),
+“Coulears of fish,”--“Coulear” meaning, I suppose, culler, or person
+appointed to select fish,--and “Sealers of Whood,” oftener expressed
+corders of wood.
+
+In 1845 we read that Asa Caswell was chosen highway “sovair.”
+
+Very ancient tradition says that the method of courtship at the Isles
+of Shoals was after this fashion: If a youth fell in love with a maid,
+he lay in wait till she passed by, and then pelted her with stones,
+after the manner of our friends of Marblehead; so that if a fair
+Shoaler found herself the centre of a volley of missiles, she might
+be sure that an ardent admirer was expressing himself with decision
+certainly, if not with tact! If she turned, and exhibited any curiosity
+as to the point of the compass whence the bombardment proceeded, her
+doubts were dispelled by another shower; but if she went on her way in
+maiden meditation, then was her swain in despair, and life, as is usual
+in such cases, became a burden to him.
+
+Within my remembrance an occasional cabbage-party made an agreeable
+variety in the life of the villagers. I never saw one, but have heard
+them described. Instead of regaling the guests with wine and ices, pork
+and cabbage were the principal refreshments offered them; and if the
+cabbage came out of the garden of a neighbor, the spice of wickedness
+lent zest to the entertainment,--stolen fruit being always the sweetest.
+
+It would seem strange that, while they live in so healthy a place,
+where the atmosphere is absolutely perfect in its purity, they should
+have suffered so much from ill health, and that so many should have
+died of consumption,--the very disease for the cure of which physicians
+send invalids hither. The reasons are soon told. The first and most
+important is this: that, as nearly as they could, they have in past
+years hermetically sealed their houses, so that the air of heaven
+should not penetrate within. An open window, especially at night, they
+would have looked upon as madness,--a temptation of Providence; and
+during the winter they have deliberately poisoned themselves with every
+breath, like two thirds of the rest of the world. I have seen a little
+room containing a whole family, fishing-boots and all, bed, furniture,
+cooking-stove in full blast, and an oil lamp with a wick so high that
+the deadly smoke rose steadily, filling the air with what Browning
+might call “filthiest gloom,” and mingling with the incense of ancient
+tobacco-pipes smoked by both sexes (for nearly all the old women used
+to smoke); every crack and cranny was stopped; and if, by any chance,
+the door opened for an instant, out rushed a fume in comparison with
+which the gusts from the lake of Tartarus might be imagined sweet. Shut
+in that deadly air, a part of the family slept, sometimes all. What
+wonder that their chests were hollow, their faces haggard, and that
+apathy settled upon them! Then their food was hardly selected with
+reference to health, saleratus and pork forming two of the principal
+ingredients in their daily fare. Within a few years past they have
+probably improved in these respects. Fifteen years ago I was passing a
+window one morning, at which a little child two years old was sitting,
+tied into a high chair before a table drawn close to the window, eating
+his breakfast alone in his glory. In his stout little fist he grasped
+a large iron spoon, and fed himself from a plate of beans swimming in
+fat, and with the pork cut up in squares for his better convenience.
+By the side of the plate stood a tin mug of bitter-strong black coffee
+sweetened with molasses. I spoke to his mother within; “Ar’n’t you
+afraid such strong coffee will kill your baby?” “O no,” she answered,
+and held it to his lips. “There, drink that,” she said, “that’ll make
+you hold your head up!” The poor child died before he grew to be a man,
+and all the family have fallen victims to consumption.
+
+Very few of the old people are left at the present time, and the
+village is very like other fishing-villages along the coast. Most of
+the peculiar characteristics of the race are lost in the present
+generation of young women, who are addicted to the use of hoops and
+water-falls, and young men, who condescend to spoil their good looks
+by dyeing their handsome blond beards with the fashionable mixture
+which inevitably produces a lustre like stove-blacking. But there are
+sensible fellows among them, fine specimens of the hardy New England
+fisherman, Saxon-bearded, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and bronzed
+with shade on shade of ruddy brown. The neutral blues and grays of
+the salt-water make perfect backgrounds for the pictures these men
+are continually showing one in their life about the boats. Nothing
+can be more satisfactory than the blendings and contrasts of color
+and the picturesque effect of the general aspect of the natives in
+their element. The eye is often struck with the richness of the color
+of some rough hand, glowing with mingled red, brown, and orange,
+against the gray-blue water, as it grasps an oar, perhaps, or pulls
+in a rope. It is strange that the sun and wind, which give such fine
+tints to the complexions of the lords of creation, should leave such
+hideous traces on the faces of women. When they are exposed to the
+same salt wind and clear sunshine they take the hue of dried fish, and
+become objects for men and angels to weep over. To see a _bona fide_
+Shoaler “sail a boat” (when the craft is a real boat and no tub) is
+an experience. The vessel obeys his hand at the rudder as a trained
+horse a touch on the rein, and seems to bow at the flash of his eye,
+turning on her heel and running up into the wind, “luffing” to lean
+again on the other tack,--obedient, graceful, perfectly beautiful,
+yielding to breeze and to billow, yet swayed throughout by a stronger
+and more imperative law. The men become strongly attached to their
+boats, which seem to have a sort of human interest for them,--and no
+wonder. They lead a life of the greatest hardship and exposure, during
+the winter especially, setting their trawls fifteen or twenty miles to
+the eastward of the islands, drawing them next day if the stormy winds
+and waves will permit, and taking the fish to Portsmouth to sell. It is
+desperately hard work, trawling at this season, with the bitter wind
+blowing in their teeth, and the flying spray freezing upon everything
+it touches,--boats, masts, sails, decks, clothes completely cased in
+ice, and fish frozen solid as soon as taken from the water. The inborn
+politeness of these fishermen to stranger-women is something delightful
+to witness. I remember once landing in Portsmouth, and being obliged to
+cross three or four schooners just in (with their freight of frozen
+fish lying open-mouthed in a solid mass on deck) to reach the wharf. No
+courtly gentlemen could have displayed more beautiful behavior than did
+these rough fellows, all pressing forward, with real grace,--because
+the feeling which prompted them was a true and lofty feeling,--to help
+me over the tangle of ropes and sails and anchors to a safe footing on
+shore. There is a ledge forty-five miles east of the islands, called
+Jeffrey’s Ledge, where the Shoalers go for spring fishing. During a
+northeast storm in May, part of the little fleet came reeling in before
+the gale; and, not daring to trust themselves to beat up into the
+harbor (a poor shelter at best), round the rocky reefs and ledges, the
+fishermen anchored under the lee of Appledore, and there rode out the
+storm. They were in continual peril; for, had their cables chafed apart
+with the shock and strain of the billows among which they plunged, or
+had their anchors dragged (which might have been expected, the bottom
+of the sea between the islands and the mainland being composed of mud,
+while all outside is rough and rocky), they would have inevitably been
+driven to their destruction on the opposite coast. It was not pleasant
+to watch them as the early twilight shut down over the vast, weltering
+desolation of the sea, to see the slender masts waving helplessly from
+one side to another,--sometimes almost horizontal, as the hulls turned
+heavily this way and that, and the long breakers rolled in endless
+succession against them. They saw the lights in our windows a half-mile
+away; and we, in the warm, bright, quiet room, sitting by a fire that
+danced and shone, fed with bits of wreck such as they might scatter
+on Rye Beach before morning, could hardly think of anything else than
+the misery of those poor fellows, wet, cold, hungry, sleepless, full
+of anxiety till the morning should break and the wind should lull. No
+boat could reach them through the terrible commotion of waves. But they
+rode through the night in safety, and the morning brought relief. One
+brave little schooner “toughed it out” on the distant ledge, and her
+captain told me that no one could stand on board of her; the pressure
+of the wind down on her decks was so great that she shuddered from stem
+to stern, and he feared she would shake to pieces, for she was old and
+not very seaworthy. Some of the men had wives and children watching
+them from lighted windows at Star. What a fearful night for them! They
+could not tell from hour to hour, through the thick darkness, if yet
+the cables held; they could not see till daybreak whether the sea had
+swallowed up their treasures. I wonder the wives were not white-haired
+when the sun rose, and showed them those little specks yet rolling in
+the breakers! The women are excessively timid about the water, more so
+than landswomen. Having the terror and might of the ocean continually
+encircling them, they become more impressed with it and distrust it,
+knowing it so well. Very few accidents happen, however: the islanders
+are a cautious people. Years ago, when the white sails of their little
+fleet of whale-boats used to flutter out of the sheltered bight and
+stand out to the fishing-grounds in the bay, how many eyes followed
+them in the early light, and watched them in the distance through
+the day, till, toward sunset, they spread their wings to fly back
+with the evening wind! How pathetic the gathering of women on the
+headlands, when out of the sky swept the squall that sent the small
+boats staggering before it, and blinded the eyes, already drowned in
+tears, with sudden rain that hid sky and sea and boats from their eager
+gaze! What wringing of hands, what despairing cries, which the wild
+wind bore away while it caught and fluttered the homely draperies and
+unfastened the locks of maid and mother, to blow them about their pale
+faces and anxious eyes! Now no longer the little fleet goes forth; for
+the greater part of the islanders have stout schooners, and go trawling
+with profit, if not with pleasure. A few solitaries fish in small
+dories and earn a slender livelihood thereby.
+
+The sea helps these poor people by bringing fuel to their very doors;
+the waves continually deposit driftwood in every fissure of the rocks.
+But sad, anxious lives they have led, especially the women, many of
+whom have grown old before their time with hard work and bitter cares,
+with hewing of wood and drawing of water, turning of fish on the flakes
+to dry in the sun, endless household work, and the cares of maternity,
+while their lords lounged about the rocks in their scarlet shirts in
+the sun, or “held up the walls of the meeting-house,” as one expressed
+it, with their brawny shoulders. I never saw such wrecks of humanity as
+some of the old women of Star Island, who have long since gone to their
+rest. In my childhood I caught glimpses of them occasionally, their
+lean brown shapes crouching over the fire, with black pipes in their
+sunken mouths, and hollow eyes, “of no use now but to gather brine,”
+and rough, gray, straggling locks: despoiled and hopeless visions, it
+seemed as if youth and joy would never have been theirs.
+
+
+                        A WOMAN OF STAR ISLAND.
+
+                        ISLES OF SHOALS, 1844.
+
+    Over the embers she sits,
+      Close at the edge of the grave,
+    With her hollow eyes like pits,
+      And her mouth like a sunken cave.
+
+    Her short black pipe held tight
+      Her withered lips between,
+    She rocks in the flickering light
+      Her figure bent and lean.
+
+    She turns the fish no more
+      That dry on the flakes in the sun;
+    No wood she drags to the door,
+      Nor water,--her labor is done.
+
+    She cares not for oath or blow,
+      She is past all hope or fear;
+    There is nothing she cares to know,
+      There is nothing hateful or dear.
+
+    Deep wrong have the bitter years
+      Wrought her, both body and soul.
+    Life has been seasoned with tears;
+      But saw not God the whole?
+
+    O wreck in woman’s shape!
+      Were you ever gracious and sweet?
+    Did youth’s enchantment drape
+      This horror, from head to feet?
+
+    Have dewy eyes looked out
+      From these hollow pits forlorn?
+    Played smiles the mouth about
+      Of shy, still rapture born?
+
+    Yea, once. But long ago
+      Has evil ground away
+    All beauty. The salt winds blow
+      On no sorrier sight to-day.
+
+    Trodden utterly out
+      Is every spark of hope.
+    There is only left her, a doubt,
+      A gesture, half-conscious, a grope
+
+    In the awful dark for a Touch
+      That never yet failed a soul.
+    Is not God tender to such?
+      Hath he not seen the whole?
+
+The local pronunciation of the Shoalers is very peculiar, and a shrewd
+sense of humor is one of their leading characteristics. Could De
+Quincey have lived among them, I think he might have been tempted to
+write an essay on swearing as a fine art, for it has reached a pitch
+hardly short of sublimity in this favored spot. They seemed to have a
+genius for it, and some of them really devoted their best powers to its
+cultivation. The language was taxed to furnish them with prodigious
+forms of speech wherewith to express the slightest emotion of pain,
+anger, or amusement; and though the blood of the listener was sometimes
+chilled in his veins, overhearing their unhesitating profanity, the
+prevailing sentiment was likely to be one of amazement mingled with
+intense amusement,--the whole thing was so grotesque and monstrous,
+and their choice of words so comical, and generally so very much to the
+point.
+
+The real Shoals phraseology existing in past years was something not
+to be described; it is impossible by any process known to science to
+convey an idea of the intonations of their speech, quite different from
+Yankee drawl or sailor-talk, and perfectly unique in itself. Why they
+should have called a swallow a “swallick” and a sparrow a “sparrick”
+I never could understand; or what they mean by calling a great gale
+or tempest a “Tan toaster.” Anything that ends in _y_ or _e_ they
+still pronounce _ay_ with great breadth; for instance, “Benny” is
+Bennaye; “Billy” Billay, and so on. A man by the name of Beebe, the
+modern “missionary,” was always spoken of as Beebay, when he was not
+called by a less respectful title. Their sense of fun showed itself
+in the nicknames with which they designated any person possessing the
+slightest peculiarity. For instance, twenty years ago a minister of the
+Methodist persuasion came to live among them; his wife was unreasonably
+tall and thin. With the utmost promptitude and decision the irreverent
+christened her “Legs,” and never spoke of her by any other name.
+“Laigs has gone to Portsmouth,” or “Laigs has got a new gown,” etc.
+A spinster of very dark complexion was called “Scip,” an abbreviation
+of Scipio, a name supposed to appertain particularly to the colored
+race. Another was called “Squint,” because of a defect in the power of
+vision; and not only were they spoken of by these names, but called
+so to their faces habitually. One man earned for himself the title of
+“Brag,” so that no one ever thought of calling him by his real name;
+his wife was Mrs. Brag; and constant use so robbed these names of their
+offensiveness that the bearers not only heard them with equanimity,
+but would hardly have known themselves by their true ones. A most
+worthy Norwegian took up his abode for a brief space among them a few
+years ago. His name was Ingebertsen. Now, to expect any Shoaler would
+trouble himself to utter such a name as that was beyond all reason. At
+once they called him “Carpenter,” apropos of nothing at all, for he
+never had been a carpenter. But the name was the first that occurred to
+them, and sufficiently easy of utterance. It was “Carpenter,” and “Mis’
+Carpenter,” and “them Carpenter children,” and the name still clings
+to fine old Ingebertsen and his family. Grandparents are addressed as
+Grans and Gwammaye, Grans being an abbreviation of grandsire. “Tell
+yer grans his dinner’s ready,” calls some woman from a cottage door.
+One old man, too lazy almost to live, was called “Hing”; one of two
+brothers “Bunker,” the other “Shothead”; an ancient scold was called
+“Zeke,” another “Sir Polly,” and so on indefinitely. In pleasant
+weather sometimes the younger women would paddle from one island to
+another “making calls.” If any old “Grans” perceived them, loafing at
+his door in the sun, “It’s going to storm! the women begin to flit!” he
+would cry, as if they were a flock of coots. A woman, describing how
+slightly her house was put together, said, “Lor’, ’twan’t never built,
+’twas only hove together.” “I don’ know whe’r or no it’s best or no to
+go fishin’ whiles mornin’,” says some rough fellow, meditating upon
+the state of winds and waters. Of his boat another says with pride,
+“_She’s_ a pretty piece of wood!” and another, “She strikes a sea and
+comes down like a pillow,” describing her smooth sailing. Some one,
+relating the way the civil authorities used to take political matters
+into their own hands, said that “if a man didn’t vote as they wanted
+him to, they took him and hove him up agin the meetin’ us,” by way of
+bringing him to his senses. Two boys in bitter contention have been
+heard calling each other “nasty-faced chowderheads,” as if the force of
+language could no further go. “I’m dryer than a graven image,” a man
+says when he is thirsty. But it is impossible to give an idea of their
+common speech leaving out the profanity which makes it so startling.
+
+Some comical stories are told of the behavior of officers of the law
+in certain emergencies. On one occasion two men attacked each other in
+the cove which served as the Plaza, the grand square of the village,
+the general lounging-place. A comrade in a state of excitement ran
+to inform the one policeman, who straightway repaired to the scene
+of battle. There were the combatants raging like wild beasts, while
+the whole community looked on aghast. What was to be done? Evidently
+something, and at once. The policeman looked about him, considering. As
+for interfering with that fearful twain, it was out of the question.
+His eye fell upon a poor old man who leaned against a fish-house
+enjoying the scene. A happy thought struck him! He dashed down upon the
+ancient and unoffending spectator, and hurled him to the ground with
+such force that he broke his collar-bone. Then, I suppose, he retired,
+serene in the proud consciousness of having done his duty, and of
+having been fully equal to the occasion.
+
+Two of the chief magistrates of the place had a deadly feud, entirely
+personal, which had smouldered between them for years. One day the
+stronger of the two quietly “arrested” the weaker, tied him hand and
+foot with ropes, “hove” him into his whale-boat, and sailed off with
+him in triumph to the land. Arrived at the city of Portsmouth, he
+conducted him to jail, delivered him over to the jailer with much
+satisfaction, crying, “There! There he is! Take him and lock him up!
+He’s a poor pris’ner. Don’t you give him nothin’ t’ eat!” and returned
+rejoicing to the bosom of his family. It being Thanksgiving Day, the
+jailer is said to have taken the prisoner at once into his house, and,
+instead of locking him up, gave him, according to his own account, “one
+of the best Thanksgiving dinners he ever ate.”
+
+Nearly all the Shoalers have a singular gait, contracted from the
+effort to keep their equilibrium while standing in boats, and from
+the unavoidable gymnastics which any attempt at locomotion among the
+rocks renders necessary. Some stiff-jointed old men have been known to
+leap wildly from broad stone to stone on the smooth, flat pavements
+of Portsmouth town, finding it out of the question to walk evenly and
+decorously along the straight and easy way. This is no fable. Such is
+the force of habit. Most of the men are more or less round-shouldered,
+and seldom row upright, with head erect and shoulders thrown back.
+They stoop so much over the fish-tables--cleaning, splitting, salting,
+packing--that they acquire a permanent habit of stooping.
+
+Twenty years ago, an old man by the name of Peter was alive on Star
+Island. He was said to be a hundred years old; and anything more
+grisly, in the shape of humanity, it has never been my lot to behold;
+so lean and brown and ancient, he might have been Methuselah, for no
+one knew how long he had lived on this rolling planet. Years before he
+died he used to paddle across to our lighthouse, in placid summer days,
+and, scanning him with a child’s curiosity, I wondered how he kept
+alive. A few white hairs clung to his yellow crown, and his pale eyes,
+“where the very blue had turned to white,” looked vacantly and wearily
+out, as if trying faintly to see the end of the things of this world.
+Somebody, probably old Nabbaye, in whose cottage he lived, always
+scoured him with soft soap before he started on his voyage, and in
+consequence a most preternatural shine overspread his blank forehead.
+His under jaw had a disagreeably suggestive habit of dropping, he was
+so feeble and so old, poor wretch! Yet would he brighten with a faint
+attempt at a smile when bread and meat were put into his hands, and
+say, over and over again, “Ye’re a Christian, ma’am; thank ye, ma’am,
+thank ye,” thrust all that was given him, no matter what, between his
+one upper garment--a checked shirt--and his bare skin, and then, by way
+of expressing his gratitude, would strike up a dolorous quaver of--
+
+                    “Over the water and over the lea
+                    And over the water to Charlie,”
+
+in a voice as querulous as a Scotch bagpipe.
+
+Old Nabbaye, and Bennaye, her husband, with whom Peter lived, were a
+queer old couple. Nabbaye had a stubbly and unequal growth of sparse
+gray hair upon her chin, which gave her a most grim and terrible
+aspect, as I remember her, with the grizzled locks standing out about
+her head like one of the Furies. Yet she was a good enough old woman,
+kind to Peter and Bennaye, and kept her bit of a cottage tidy as might
+be. I well remember the grit of the shining sand on her scoured floor
+beneath my childish footsteps. The family climbed at night by a ladder
+up into a loft, which their little flock of fowls shared with them,
+to sleep. Going by the house one evening, some one heard Nabbaye call
+aloud to Bennaye up aloft, “Come, Bennaye, fetch me down them heens’
+aigs!” To which Bennaye made answer, “I can’t find no aigs! I’ve looked
+een the bed and een under the bed, and I can’t find no aigs!”
+
+Till Bennaye grew very feeble, every summer night he paddled abroad
+in his dory to fish for hake, and lonely he looked, tossing among
+the waves, when our boat bore down and passed him with a hail which
+he faintly returned, as we plunged lightly through the track of the
+moonlight, young and happy, rejoicing in the beauty of the night, while
+poor Bennaye only counted his gains in the grisly hake he caught, nor
+considered the rubies the lighthouse scattered on the waves, or how the
+moon sprinkled down silver before him. He did not mind the touch of
+the balmy wind that blew across his weather-beaten face with the same
+sweet greeting that so gladdened us, but fished and fished, watching
+his line through the short summer night, and, when a blush of dawn
+stole up in the east among the stars, wound up his tackle, took his
+oars, and paddled home to Nabbaye with his booty,--his “fare of fish”
+as the natives have it. Hake-fishing after this picturesque and tedious
+fashion is done away with now; the islands are girdled with trawls,
+which catch more fish in one night than could be obtained in a week’s
+hard labor by hand.
+
+When the dust of Bennaye and Nabbaye was mingled in the thin earth that
+scarce can cover the multitude of the dead on Star Island, a youthful
+couple, in whom I took great interest, occupied their little house. The
+woman was remarkably handsome, with a beautiful head and masses of rich
+black hair, a face regular as the face of a Greek statue, with eyes
+that sparkled and cheeks that glowed,--a beauty she soon exchanged for
+haggard and hollow looks. As their children were born they asked my
+advice on the christening of each, and, being youthful and romantic, I
+suggested Frederick as a sounding title for the first-born boy. Taylor
+being the reigning President, his name was instantly added, and the
+child was always addressed by his whole name. Going by the house one
+day, my ears were assailed by a sharp outcry: “Frederick Taylor, if you
+don’t come into the house this minute, I’ll slat your head off!” The
+tender mother borrowed her expression from the fishermen, who disengage
+mackerel and other delicate-gilled fish by “slatting” them off the hook.
+
+All this family have gone, and the house in which they lived has fallen
+to ruin; only the cellar remains, just such a rude hollow as those
+scattered over Appledore.
+
+The people along the coast rather look down upon the Shoalers as being
+beyond the bounds of civilization. A young islander was expressing
+his opinion on some matter to a native of Rye, who answered him with
+great scorn: “You don’t know nothin’ about it! What do _you_ know?
+_You_ never see an apple-tree all blowed out.” A Shoaler, walking with
+some friends along a road in Rye, excited inextinguishable laughter by
+clutching his companion’s sleeve as a toad hopped innocently across the
+way, and crying: “Mr. Berraye, what kind of a bug do you call that?
+D--d if I ever see such a bug as that, Mr. Berraye!” in a comical
+terror. There are neither frogs nor toads at the Shoals. “Set right
+down and help yourselves,” said an old fellow at whose door some guests
+from the Shoals appeared at dinner-time. “Eat all you can. I ain’t got
+no manners; the girl’s got the manners, and she ain’t to hum.”
+
+One old Shoaler, long since gone to another world, was a laughable and
+curious character. A man more wonderfully fulfilling the word “homely”
+in the Yankee sense, I never saw. He had the largest, most misshapen
+cheek-bones ever constructed, an illimitable upper lip, teeth that
+should not be mentioned, and small, watery eyes. Skin and hair and eyes
+and mouth were of the same pasty yellow, and that grotesque head was
+set on a little, thin, and shambling body. He used to be head singer
+at the church, and “pitched the tune” by whistling when the parson
+had read the hymn. Then all who could joined in the singing, which
+must have been remarkable, to say the least. So great a power of brag
+is seldom found in one human being as that which permeated him from
+top to toe, and found vent in stories of personal prowess and bravery
+unexampled in history. He used to tell a story of his encounter with
+thirteen “Spanish grandeers” in New Orleans, he having been a sailor
+a great part of his life. He was innocently peering into a theatre,
+when the “grandeers” fell upon him out of the exceeding pride of their
+hearts. “Wall, sir, I turned, and I laid six o’ them grandeers to the
+right and seven to the left, and then I put her for the old brig, and I
+heerd no more on ’em!”
+
+He considered himself unequalled as a musician, and would sing you
+ballad after ballad, sitting bent forward with his arms on his knees,
+and his wrinkled eyelids screwed tight together, grinding out the tune
+with a quiet steadiness of purpose that seemed to betoken no end to his
+capacities. Ballads of love and of war he sang,--the exploits of “Brave
+Wolf,” or, as he pronounced it, “Brahn Wolf,” and one famous song of a
+naval battle, of which only two lines remain in my memory;--
+
+           “With sixteen brass nineteens the Lion did growl,
+           With nineteen brass twenties the Tiger did howl.”
+
+At the close of each verse he invariably dropped his voice, and said,
+instead of sung, the last word, which had a most abrupt and surprising
+effect, to which a listener never could become accustomed. The immortal
+ballad of Lord Bateman he had remodelled with beautiful variations
+of his own. The name of the coy maiden, the Turk’s only daughter,
+Sophia, was Susan Fryan, according to his version, and Lord Bateman
+was metamorphosed into Lord Bakum. When Susan Fryan crosses the sea to
+Lord Bakum’s castle and knocks so loud that the gates do ring, he makes
+the bold young porter, who was so ready for to let her in, go to his
+master, who sits feasting with a new bride, and say:--
+
+    “Seven long years have I tended your gate, sir,
+      Seven long years out of twenty-three,
+    But so fair a creetur as now stands waitin’
+      Never before with my eyes did see.
+
+    “O, she has rings on every finger,
+      And round her middle if she’s one she has three;
+    O, I’m sure she’s got more good gold about her
+      Than would buy your bride and her companie!”
+
+The enjoyment with which he gave this song was delightful to witness.
+Of the many he used to sing, one was a doleful story of how a youth of
+high degree fell in love with his mother’s fair waiting-woman, Betsy,
+who was in consequence immediately transported to foreign lands. But
+alas for her lover!--
+
+    “Then he fell sick and like to have died;
+    His mother round his sick-bed cried,
+    But all her crying it was in vain,
+    For Betsy was a-ploughing the raging main!”
+
+The word “main” was brought out with startling effect. Another song
+about a miller and his sons I only half remember:--
+
+    “The miller he called his oldest son,
+    Saying, ‘Now my glass it is almost run,
+    If I to you the mill relate,
+    What toll do you _re_sign to take?’
+
+    “The son replied: ‘My name is Jack,
+    And out of a bushel I’ll take a peck.’
+    ‘Go, go, you fool!’ the old man cried,
+    And called the next to his bedside.
+
+    “The second said: ‘My name is Ralph,
+    And out of a bushel I’ll take a half.’
+    ‘Go, go, you fool!’ the old man cried,
+    And called the next to his bedside.
+
+    “The youngest said: ‘My name is Paul,
+    And out of a bushel I’ll take it all!’
+    ‘You are my son!’ the old man cried,
+    And _shot_ up his eyes and died in peace.”
+
+The manner in which this last verse was delivered was inimitable, the
+“died in peace” being spoken with great satisfaction. The singer had an
+ancient violin, which he used to hug under his wizened chin, and from
+which he drew such dismal tones as never before were heard on sea or
+land. He had no more idea of playing than one of the codfish he daily
+split and salted, yet he christened with pride all the shrieks and
+wails he drew out of the wretched instrument with various high-sounding
+titles. After he had entertained his audience for a while with these
+aimless sounds, he was wont to say, “Wall, now I’ll give yer Prince
+Esterhazy’s March,” and forthwith began again precisely the same
+intolerable squeak.
+
+After he died, other stars in the musical world appeared in the
+horizon, but none equalled him. They all seemed to think it necessary
+to shut their eyes and squirm like nothing human during the process
+of singing a song, and they “pitched the tune” so high that no human
+voice ever could hope to reach it in safety. “Tew high, Bill, tew
+high,” one would say to the singer, with slow solemnity; so Bill tried
+again. “Tew high again, Bill, tew high.” “Wull, _you_ strike it, Obed,”
+Bill would say in despair; and Obed would “strike,” and hit exactly
+the same impossible altitude, whereat Bill would slap his knee, and
+cry in glad surprise, “D--d if he ain’t got it!” and forth, with catch
+Obed and launch on his perilous flight, and grow red in the face with
+the mighty effort of getting up there, and remaining there through the
+intricacies and variations of the melody. One could but wonder whence
+these queer tunes came,--how they were created; some of them reminded
+one of the creaking and groaning of windlasses and masts, the rattling
+of rowlocks, the whistling of winds among cordage, yet with less of
+music in them than these natural sounds. The songs of the sailors
+heaving up the anchor are really beautiful often, the wild chant that
+rises sometimes into a grand chorus, all the strong voices borne out on
+the wind in the cry of
+
+                      “Yo ho, the roaring river!”
+
+But these Shoals performances are lacking in any charm, except that of
+the broadest fun.
+
+The process of dunning, which made the Shoals fish so famous a century
+ago, is almost a lost art, though the chief fisherman at Star still
+“duns” a few yearly. A real dunfish is handsome, cut in transparent
+strips, the color of brown sherry wine. The process is a tedious
+one: the fish are piled in the storehouse and undergo a period of
+“sweating” after the first drying, then are carried out into sun and
+wind, dried again slightly, and again piled in the warehouse, and so on
+till the process is complete. Drying fish in the common fashion is more
+difficult than might be imagined: it is necessary to watch and tend
+them continually as they lie on the picturesque “flakes,” and if they
+are exposed at too early a stage to a sun too hot they burn as surely
+as a loaf of bread in an intemperate oven, only the burning does not
+crisp, but liquefies their substance.
+
+For the last ten years fish have been caught about the Shoals by
+trawl and seine in such quantities that they are thinning fast, and
+the trade bids fair to be much less lucrative before many years have
+elapsed. The process of drawing the trawl is very picturesque and
+interesting, watched from the rocks or from the boat itself. The buoy
+being drawn in, then follow the baited hooks one after another. First,
+perhaps, a rockling shows his bright head above water; a pull, and in
+he comes flapping, with brilliant red fins distended, gaping mouth,
+indigo-colored eyes, and richly mottled skin: a few futile somersets,
+and he subsides into slimy dejection. Next, perhaps, a big whelk is
+tossed into the boat; then a leaden-gray haddock, with its dark stripe
+of color on each side; then, perhaps, follow a few bare hooks; then
+a hake, with horrid, cavernous mouth; then a large purple star-fish,
+or a clattering crab; then a ling,--a yellow-brown, wide-mouthed piece
+of ugliness never eaten here, but highly esteemed on the coast of
+Scotland; then more cod or haddock, or perhaps a lobster, bristling
+with indignation at the novel situation in which he finds himself;
+then a cusk, long, smooth, compact, and dark; then a catfish. Of all
+fiends commend me to the catfish as the most fiendish! Black as night,
+with thick and hideous skin, which looks a dull, mouldy green beneath
+the water, a head shaped as much like a cat’s as a fish’s head can
+be, in which the devil’s own eyes seem to glow with a dull, malicious
+gleam,--and such a mouth! What terrible expressions these cold
+creatures carry to and fro in the vast, dim spaces of the sea! All fish
+have a more or less imbecile and wobegone aspect; but this one looks
+absolutely evil, and Schiller might well say of him that he “grins
+through the grate of his spiky teeth,” and sharp and deadly are they;
+every man looks out for his boots when a catfish comes tumbling in, for
+they bite through leather, flesh, and bones. They seize a ballast-stone
+between their jaws, and their teeth snap and fly in all directions. I
+have seen them bite the long blade of a sharp knife so fiercely, that,
+when it was lifted and held aloft, they kept their furious gripe, and
+dangled, flapping all their clumsy weight, hanging by their teeth to
+the blade. Sculpins abound, and are a nuisance on the trawls. Ugly and
+grotesque as are the full-grown fish, there is nothing among the finny
+tribe more dainty, more quaint and delicate, than the baby sculpin.
+Sometimes in a pool of crystal water one comes upon him unawares,--a
+fairy creature, the color of a blush-rose, striped and freaked and
+pied with silver and gleaming green, hanging in the almost invisible
+water as a bird in air, with broad, transparent fins suffused with a
+faint pink color, stretched wide like wings to upbear the supple form.
+The curious head is only strange, not hideous as yet, and one gazes
+marvelling at all the beauty lavished on a thing of so little worth.
+
+Wolf-fish, first cousins to the catfish, are found also on the trawls;
+and dog-fish, with pointed snouts and sand-paper skins, abound to
+such an extent as to drive away everything else sometimes. Sand-dabs,
+a kind of flounder, fasten their sluggish bodies to the hooks, and a
+few beautiful red fish, called bream, are occasionally found; also a
+few blue-fish and sharks; frequently halibut,--though these latter
+are generally caught on trawls which are made especially for them.
+Sometimes is caught on a trawl a monstrous creature of horrible aspect,
+called the nurse-fish,--an immense fish weighing twelve hundred pounds,
+with a skin like a nutmeg-grater, and no teeth,--a kind of sucker,
+hence its name. I asked a Shoaler what the nurse-fish looked like, and
+he answered promptly, “Like the Devil!” One weighing twelve hundred
+pounds has “two barrels of liver,” as the natives phrase it, which is
+very valuable for the oil it contains. One of the fishermen described a
+creature which they call mud-eel,--a foot and a half long, with a mouth
+like a rat, and two teeth. The bite of this water-snake is poisonous,
+the islanders aver, and tell a story of a man bitten by one at Mount
+Desert last year, “who did not live long enough to get to the doctor.”
+They bite at the hooks on the trawl, and are drawn up in a lump of mud,
+and the men cut the ropes and mangle their lines to get rid of them.
+Huge sunfish are sometimes harpooned, lying on the top of the water,--a
+lump of flesh like cocoanut meat encased in a skin like rubber cloth,
+with a most dim and abject hint of a face, absurdly disproportionate
+to the size of the body, roughly outlined on the edge. Sword-fish are
+also harpooned, weighing eight hundred pounds and upward; they are very
+delicate food. A sword-fish swimming leaves a wake a mile long on a
+calm day, and bewilders the imagination into a belief in sea-serpents.
+There’s a legend that a torpedo was caught here once upon a time; and
+the thrasher, fox-shark, or sea-fox occasionally alarms the fisherman
+with his tremendous flexible tail, that reaches “from the gunnel to
+the mainmast-top” when the creature comes to the surface. Also they
+tell of skip-jacks that sprang on board their boats at night when
+they were hake-fishing,--“little things about as large as mice, long
+and slender, with beaks like birds.” Sometimes a huge horse-mackerel
+flounders in and drives ashore on a ledge, for the gulls to scream
+over for weeks. Mackerel, herring, porgies, and shiners used to abound
+before the seines so thinned them. Bonito and blue-fish and dog-fish
+help drive away the more valuable varieties. It is a lovely sight
+to see a herring-net drawn in, especially by moonlight, when every
+fish hangs like a long silver drop from the close-set meshes. Perch
+are found in inexhaustible quantities about the rocks, and lump or
+butter fish are sometimes caught; pollock are very plentiful,--smooth,
+graceful, slender creatures! It is fascinating to watch them turning
+somersets in the water close to the shore in full tides, or following a
+boat at sunset, and breaking the molten gold of the sea’s surface with
+silver-sparkling fin and tail. The rudder-fish is sometimes found, and
+alewives and menhaden. Whales are more or less plentiful in summer,
+“spouting their foam-fountains in the sea.” Beautiful is the sparkling
+column of water rising suddenly afar off and falling noiselessly back
+again. Not long ago a whale twisted his tail in the cable of the
+schooner Vesper, lying to the eastward of the Shoals, and towed the
+vessel several miles, at the rate of twenty knots an hour, with the
+water boiling all over her from stem to stern!
+
+Last winter some of the Shoalers were drawing a trawl between the
+Shoals and Boone Island, fifteen miles to the eastward. As they drew in
+the line and relieved each hook of its burden, lo! a horror was lifted
+half above the surface,--part of a human body, which dropped off the
+hooks and was gone, while they shuddered, and stared at each other,
+aghast at the hideous sight.
+
+Porpoises are seen at all seasons. I never saw one near enough to
+gain a knowledge of its expression, but it always seemed to me that
+these fish led a more hilarious life than the greater part of their
+race, and I think they must carry less dejected countenances than
+most of the inhabitants of the sea. They frisk so delightfully on
+the surface, and ponderously plunge over and over with such apparent
+gayety and satisfaction! I remember being out one moonless summer
+night beyond the lighthouse island, in a little boat filled with gay
+young people. The sea was like oil, the air was thick and warm, no
+star broke the upper darkness, only now and then the lighthouse threw
+its jewelled track along the water, and through the dense air its long
+rays stretched above, turning solemnly, like the luminous spokes of a
+gigantic wheel, as the lamps slowly revolved. There had been much talk
+and song and laughter, much playing with the warm waves (or rather
+smooth undulations of the sea, for there wasn’t a breath of wind to
+make a ripple), which broke at a touch into pale-green, phosphorescent
+fire. Beautiful arms, made bare to the shoulder, thrust down into
+the liquid darkness, shone flaming silver and gold; from the fingers
+playing beneath, fire seemed to stream; emerald sparks clung to the
+damp draperies; and a splashing oar-blade half revealed sweet faces and
+bright young eyes. Suddenly a pause came in talk and song and laughter,
+and in the unaccustomed silence we seemed to be waiting for something.
+At once out of the darkness came a slow, tremendous sigh that made
+us shiver in the soft air, as if all the woe and terror of the sea
+were condensed in that immense and awful breath; and we took our oars
+and pulled homeward, with the weird fires flashing from our bows and
+oar-blades. “Only a porpoise blowing,” said the initiated, when we told
+our tale. It may have been “only a porpoise blowing”; but the leviathan
+himself could hardly have made a more prodigious sound.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within the lovely limits of summer it is beautiful to live almost
+anywhere; most beautiful where the ocean meets the land; and here
+particularly, where all the varying splendor of the sea encompasses
+the place, and the ceaseless changing of the tides brings continual
+refreshment into the life of every day. But summer is late and slow to
+come; and long after the mainland has begun to bloom and smile beneath
+the influence of spring, the bitter northwest winds still sweep the
+cold, green water about these rocks, and tear its surface into long
+and glittering waves from morning till night, and from night till
+morning, through many weeks. No leaf breaks the frozen soil, and no
+bud swells on the shaggy bushes that clothe the slopes. But if summer
+is a laggard in her coming, she makes up for it by the loveliness of
+her lingering into autumn; for when the pride of trees and flowers is
+despoiled by frost on shore, the little gardens here are glowing at
+their brightest, and day after day of mellow splendor drops like a
+benediction from the hand of God. In the early mornings in September
+the mists draw away from the depths of inland valleys, and rise into
+the lucid western sky,--tall columns and towers of cloud, solid,
+compact, superb; their pure, white, shining heads uplifted into the
+ether, solemn, stately, and still, till some wandering breeze disturbs
+their perfect outline, and they melt about the heavens in scattered
+fragments as the day goes on. Then there are mornings when “all in
+the blue, unclouded weather” the coast-line comes out so distinctly
+that houses, trees, bits of white beach, are clearly visible, and with
+a glass, moving forms of carriages and cattle are distinguishable
+nine miles away. In the transparent air the peaks of Mounts Madison,
+Washington, and Jefferson are seen distinctly at a distance of one
+hundred miles. In the early light even the green color of the trees
+is perceptible on the Rye shore. All through these quiet days the air
+is full of wandering thistle-down, the inland golden-rod waves its
+plumes, and close by the water’s edge, in rocky clefts, its seaside
+sister blossoms in gorgeous color; the rose-haws redden, the iris
+unlocks its shining caskets, and casts its closely packed seeds about,
+gray berries cluster on the bayberry-bushes, the sweet life-everlasting
+sends out its wonderful, delicious fragrance, and the pale asters
+spread their flowers in many-tinted sprays. Through October and into
+November the fair, mild weather lasts. At the first breath of October,
+the hillside at Appledore fires up with the living crimson of the
+huckleberry-bushes, as if a blazing torch had been applied to it; the
+slanting light at sunrise and sunset makes a wonderful glory across
+it. The sky deepens its blue; beneath it the brilliant sea glows into
+violet, and flashes into splendid purple where the “tide-rip,” or
+eddying winds, make long streaks across its surface (poets are not
+wrong who talk of “purple seas,”) the air is clear and sparkling,
+the lovely summer haze withdraws, all things take a crisp and tender
+outline, and the cry of the curlew and the plover is doubly sweet
+through the pure, cool air. Then sunsets burn in clear and tranquil
+skies, or flame in piled magnificence of clouds. Some night a long
+bar lies, like a smouldering brand, along the horizon, deep carmine
+where the sun has touched it; and out of that bar breaks a sudden
+gale before morning, and a fine fury and tumult begins to rage. Then
+comes the fitful weather,--wild winds and hurrying waves, low, scudding
+clouds, tremendous rains that shut out everything; and the rocks lie
+weltering between the sea and sky, with the brief fire of the leaves
+quenched and swept away on the hillside,--only rushing wind and
+streaming water everywhere, as if a second deluge were flooding the
+world.
+
+After such a rain comes a gale from the southeast to sweep the sky
+clear,--a gale so furious that it blows the sails straight out of the
+bolt-ropes, if any vessel is so unfortunate as to be caught in it with
+a rag of canvas aloft; and the coast is strewn with the wrecks of such
+craft as happen to be caught on the lee shore, for
+
+                   “Anchors drag, and topmasts lap,”
+
+and nothing can hold against this terrible, blind fury. It is appalling
+to listen to the shriek of such a wind, even though one is safe upon a
+rock that cannot move; and more dreadful is it to see the destruction
+one cannot lift a finger to avert.
+
+As the air grows colder, curious atmospheric effects become visible. At
+the first biting cold the distant mainland has the appearance of being
+taken off its feet, as it were,--the line shrunken and distorted,
+detached from the water at both ends: it is as if one looked under it
+and saw the sky beyond. Then, on bright mornings with a brisk wind,
+little wafts of mist rise between the quick, short waves, and melt away
+before noon. At some periods of intense cold these mists, which are
+never in banks like fog, rise in irregular, whirling columns reaching
+to the clouds,--shadowy phantoms, torn and wild, that stalk past
+like Ossian’s ghosts, solemnly and noiselessly throughout the bitter
+day. When the sun drops down behind these weird processions, with a
+dark-red, lurid light, it is like a vast conflagration, wonderful and
+terrible to see. The columns, that strike and fall athwart the island,
+sweep against the windows with a sound like sand, and lie on the ground
+in ridges, like fine, sharp hail; yet the heavens are clear, the
+heavily rolling sea dark-green and white, and, between the breaking
+crests, the misty columns stream toward the sky.
+
+Sometimes a totally different vapor, like cold, black smoke, rolls
+out from the land, and flows over the sea to an unknown distance,
+swallowing up the islands on its way. Its approach is hideous to
+witness. “It’s all thick o’ black vapor,” some islander announces,
+coming in from out of doors; just as they say, “It’s all thick o’ white
+foam,” when the sudden squall tears the sea into fringes of spray.
+
+In December the colors seem to fade out of the world, and utter
+ungraciousness prevails. The great, cool, whispering, delicious sea,
+that encircled us with a thousand caresses the beautiful summer
+through, turns slowly our sullen and inveterate enemy; leaden it lies
+beneath a sky like tin, and rolls its “white, cold, heavy-plunging
+foam” against a shore of iron. Each island wears its chalk-white
+girdle of ice between the rising and falling tides (edged with black
+at low-water, where the lowest-growing seaweed is exposed), making the
+stern bare rocks above more forbidding by their contrast with its stark
+whiteness,--and the whiteness of salt-water ice is ghastly. Nothing
+stirs abroad, except perhaps
+
+                      “A lonely sea-bird crosses,
+                        With one waft of wing,”
+
+your view, as you gaze from some spray-incrusted window; or you behold
+the weather-beaten schooners creeping along the blurred coast-line from
+Cape Elizabeth and the northern ports of Maine towards Cape Ann, laden
+with lumber or lime, and sometimes, rarely, with hay or provisions.
+
+After winter has fairly set in, the lonely dwellers at the Isles of
+Shoals find life quite as much as they can manage, being so entirely
+thrown upon their own resources that it requires all the philosophy
+at their disposal to answer the demand. In the village, where several
+families make a little community, there should be various human
+interests outside each separate fireside; but of their mode of life
+I know little. Upon three of the islands live isolated families, cut
+off by the “always wind-obeying deep” from each other and from the
+mainland, sometimes for weeks together, when the gales are fiercest,
+with no letters nor intercourse with any living thing. Some sullen day
+in December the snow begins to fall, and the last touch of desolation
+is laid upon the scene; there is nothing any more but white snow
+and dark water, hemmed in by a murky horizon; and nothing moves or
+sounds within its circle but the sea harshly assailing the shore, and
+the chill wind that sweeps across. Toward night the wind begins to
+rise, the snow whirls and drifts, and clings wherever it can find a
+resting-place; and though so much is blown away, yet there is enough
+left to smother up the rock and make it almost impossible to move about
+on it. The drifts sometimes are very deep in the hollows; one winter,
+sixteen sheep were buried in a drift, in which they remained a week,
+and, strange to say, only one was dead when they were discovered. One
+goes to sleep in the muffled roar of the storm, and wakes to find
+it still raging with senseless fury; all day it continues; towards
+night the curtain of falling flakes withdraws, a faint light shows
+westward; slowly the clouds roll together, the lift grows bright with
+pale, clear blue over the land, the wind has hauled to the northwest,
+and the storm is at an end. When the clouds are swept away by the
+besom of the pitiless northwest, how the stars glitter in the frosty
+sky! What wondrous streamers of northern lights flare through the
+winter darkness! I have seen the sky at midnight crimson and emerald
+and orange and blue in palpitating sheets along the whole northern
+half of the heavens, or rosy to the zenith, or belted with a bar of
+solid yellow light from east to west, as if the world were a basket,
+and it the golden handle thereto. The weather becomes of the first
+importance to the dwellers on the rock; the changes of the sky and sea,
+the flitting of the coasters to and fro, the visits of the sea-fowl,
+sunrise and sunset, the changing moon, the northern lights, the
+constellations that wheel in splendor through the winter night,--all
+are noted with a love and careful scrutiny that is seldom given by
+people living in populous places. One grows accustomed to the aspect
+of the constellations, and they seem like the faces of old friends
+looking down out of the awful blackness; and when in summer the great
+Orion disappears, how it is missed out of the sky! I remember the
+delight with which we caught a glimpse of the planet Mercury, in March,
+1868, following close at the heels of the sinking sun, redly shining in
+the reddened horizon,--a stranger mysterious and utterly unknown before.
+
+For these things make our world: there are no lectures, operas,
+concerts, theatres, no music of any kind, except what the waves may
+whisper in rarely gentle moods; no galleries of wonders like the
+Natural History rooms, in which it is so fascinating to wander; no
+streets, shops, carriages, no postman, no neighbors, not a door-bell
+within the compass of the place! Never was life so exempt from
+interruptions. The eight or ten small schooners that carry on winter
+fishing, flying to and fro through foam and squall to set and haul
+in their trawls, at rare intervals bring a mail,--an accumulation of
+letters, magazines, and newspapers that it requires a long time to plod
+through. This is the greatest excitement of the long winters; and no
+one can truly appreciate the delight of letters till he has lived where
+he can hear from his friends only once in a month.
+
+But the best balanced human mind is prone to lose its elasticity, and
+stagnate, in this isolation. One learns immediately the value of work
+to keep one’s wits clear, cheerful, and steady; just as much real work
+of the body as it can bear without weariness being always beneficent,
+but here indispensable. And in this matter women have the advantage of
+men, who are condemned to fold their hands when their tasks are done.
+No woman need ever have a vacant minute,--there are so many pleasant,
+useful things which she may, and had better do. Blessed be the man
+who invented knitting! (I never heard that a woman invented this or
+any other art.) It is the most charming and picturesque of quiet
+occupations, leaving the knitter free to read aloud, or talk, or think,
+while steadily and surely beneath the flying fingers the comfortable
+stocking grows.
+
+No one can dream what a charm there is in taking care of pets,
+singing-birds, plants, etc., with such advantages of solitude; how
+every leaf and bud and flower is pored over, and admired, and loved! A
+whole conservatory, flushed with azaleas, and brilliant with forests
+of camellias and every precious exotic that blooms, could not impart
+so much delight as I have known a single rose to give, unfolding in
+the bleak bitterness of a day in February, when this side of the
+planet seemed to have arrived at its culmination of hopelessness, with
+the Isles of Shoals the most hopeless speck upon its surface. One
+gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious
+as Picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy,
+such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in
+their whole round of shifting diversions. With a bright and cheerful
+interior, open fires, books, and pictures, windows full of thrifty
+blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing-birds, plenty
+of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, it would go hard if
+one could not be happy even in such loneliness. Books, of course, are
+inestimable. Nowhere does one follow a play of Shakespeare’s with
+greater zest, for it brings the whole world, which you need, about
+you; doubly precious the deep thoughts wise men have given to help
+us,--doubly sweet the songs of all the poets; for nothing comes between
+to distract you.
+
+One realizes how hard it was for Robinson Crusoe to keep the record of
+his lonely days; for even in a family of eight or nine the succession
+is kept with difficulty. I recollect that, after an unusually busy
+Saturday, when household work was done, and lessons said, and the
+family were looking forward to Sunday and merited leisure, at sunset
+came a young Star-Islander on some errand to our door. One said to him,
+“Well, Jud, how many fish have they caught to-day at Star?” Jud looked
+askance and answered, like one who did not wish to be trifled with, “We
+don’t go a-fishing Sundays!” So we had lost our Sunday, thinking it
+was Saturday; and next day began the usual business, with no break of
+refreshing rest between.
+
+Though the thermometer says that here it is twelve degrees warmer in
+winter than on the mainland, the difference is hardly perceptible,--the
+situation is so bleak, while the winds of the north and west bite like
+demons, with all the bitter breath of the snowy continent condensed in
+their deadly chill. Easterly and southerly gales are milder; we have
+no east winds such as sadden humanity on shore; they are tempered to
+gentleness by some mysterious means. Sometimes there are periods of
+cold which, though not intense (the mercury seldom falling lower than
+11° above zero), are of such long duration that the fish are killed in
+the sea. This happens frequently with perch, the dead bodies of which
+strew the shores and float on the water in masses. Sometimes ice forms
+in the mouth of the Piscataqua River, which, continually broken into
+unequal blocks by the rushing tide and the immense pressure of the
+outer ocean, fills the space between the islands and the shore, so that
+it is very difficult to force a boat through. The few schooners moored
+about the islands become so loaded with ice that sometimes they sink;
+every plunge into the assailing waves adds a fresh crust, infinitely
+thin; but in twenty-four hours enough accumulates to sink the vessel;
+and it is part of the day’s work in the coldest weather to beat off the
+ice,--and hard work it is. Every time the bowsprit dips under, the man
+who sits astride it is immersed to his waist in the freezing water,
+as he beats at the bow to free the laboring craft. I cannot imagine a
+harder life than the sailors lead in winter in the coasting-vessels
+that stream in endless processions to and fro along the shore; and
+they seem to be the hardest set of people under the sun,--so rough and
+reckless that they are not pleasant even at a distance. Sometimes they
+land here. A crew of thirteen or fourteen came on shore last winter;
+they might have been the ghosts of the men who manned the picaroons
+that used to swarm in these seas. A more piratical-looking set could
+not well be imagined. They roamed about, and glared in at the windows
+with weather-beaten, brutal faces, and eyes that showed traces of
+whiskey, ugly and unmistakable.
+
+No other visitors break the solitude of Appledore, except neighbors
+from Star once in a while; if any one is sick, they send, perhaps, for
+medicine or milk; or they bring some rare fish; or if any one dies,
+and they cannot reach the mainland, they come to get a coffin made. I
+never shall forget one long, dreary, drizzly northeast storm, when two
+men rowed across from Star to Appledore on this errand. A little child
+had died, and they could not sail to the mainland, and had no means
+to construct a coffin among themselves. All day I watched the making
+of that little chrysalis; and at night the last nail was driven in,
+and it lay across a bench in the midst of the litter of the workshop,
+and a curious stillness seemed to emanate from the senseless boards.
+I went back to the house and gathered a handful of scarlet geranium,
+and returned with it through the rain. The brilliant blossoms were
+sprinkled with glittering drops. I laid them in the little coffin,
+while the wind wailed so sorrowfully outside, and the rain poured
+against the windows. Two men came through the mist and storm, and one
+swung the light little shell to his shoulder, and they carried it away,
+and the gathering darkness shut down and hid them as they tossed
+among the waves. I never saw the little girl, but where they buried
+her I know: the lighthouse shines close by, and every night the quiet,
+constant ray steals to her grave and softly touches it, as if to say,
+with a caress, “Sleep well! Be thankful you are spared so much that I
+see humanity endure, fixed here forever where I stand!”
+
+It is exhilarating, spite of the intense cold, to wake to the
+brightness the northwest gale always brings, after the hopeless smother
+of a prolonged snow-storm. The sea is deep indigo, whitened with
+flashing waves all over the surface; the sky is speckless; no cloud
+passes across it the whole day long; and the sun sets red and clear,
+without any abatement of the wind. The spray flying on the western
+shore for a moment is rosy as the sinking sun shines through, but for
+a moment only,--and again there is nothing but the ghastly whiteness
+of the salt-water ice, the cold, gray rock, the sullen, foaming brine,
+the unrelenting heavens, and the sharp wind cutting like a knife. All
+night long it roars beneath the hollow sky,--roars still at sunrise.
+Again the day passes precisely like the one gone before; the sun lies
+in a glare of quicksilver on the western water, sinks again in the
+red west to rise on just such another day; and thus goes on, for
+weeks sometimes, with an exasperating pertinacity that would try the
+most philosophical patience. There comes a time when just that glare
+of quicksilver on the water is not to be endured a minute longer.
+During this period no boat goes to or comes from the mainland, and the
+prisoners on the rock are cut off from all intercourse with their kind.
+Abroad, only the cattle move, crowding into the sunniest corners, and
+stupidly chewing the cud; and the hens and ducks, that chatter and
+cackle and cheerfully crow in spite of fate and the northwest gale.
+The dauntless and graceful gulls soar on their strong pinions over the
+drift cast up about the coves. Sometimes flocks of snow-buntings wheel
+about the house and pierce the loud breathing of the wind with sweet,
+wild cries. And often the spectral arctic owl may be seen on a height,
+sitting upright, like a column of snow, its large, round head slowly
+turning from left to right, ever on the alert, watching for the rats
+that plague the settlement almost as grievously as they did Hamelin
+town, in Brunswick, five hundred years ago.
+
+How the rats came here first is not known; probably some old ship
+imported them. They live partly on mussels, the shells of which lie in
+heaps about their holes, as the violet-lined fresh-water shells lie
+about the nests of the muskrats on the mainland. They burrow among the
+rocks close to the shore, in favorable spots, and, somewhat like the
+moles, make subterranean galleries, whence they issue at low tide, and,
+stealing to the crevices of seaweed-curtained rocks, they fall upon
+and dislodge any unfortunate crabs they may find, and kill and devour
+them. Many a rat has caught a Tartar in this perilous kind of hunting,
+has been dragged into the sea and killed,--drowned in the clutches of
+the crab he sought to devour; for the strength of these shell-fish is
+something astonishing.
+
+Several snowy owls haunt the islands the whole winter long. I have
+never heard them cry like other owls; when disturbed or angry, they
+make a sound like a watchman’s rattle, very loud and harsh, or they
+whistle with intense shrillness, like a human being. Their habitual
+silence adds to their ghostliness; and when at noonday they sit, high
+up, snow-white above the snow-drifts, blinking their pale yellow eyes
+in the sun, they are weird indeed. One night in March I saw one perched
+upon a rock between me and the “last remains of sunset dimly burning”
+in the west, his curious outline drawn black against the redness of the
+sky, his large head bent forward, and the whole aspect meditative and
+most human in its expression. I longed to go out and sit beside him and
+talk to him in the twilight, to ask of him the story of his life, or,
+if he would have permitted it, to watch him without a word. The plumage
+of this creature is wonderfully beautiful,--white, with scattered spots
+like little flecks of tawny cloud,--and his black beak and talons are
+powerful and sharp as iron; he might literally grapple his friend, or
+his enemy, with hooks of steel. As he is clothed in a mass of down,
+his outlines are so soft that he is like an enormous snowflake while
+flying; and he is a sight worth seeing when he stretches wide his broad
+wings, and sweeps down on his prey, silent and swift, with an unerring
+aim, and bears it off to the highest rock he can find, to devour it. In
+the summer one finds frequently upon the heights a little, solid ball
+of silvery fur and pure white bones, washed and bleached by the rain
+and sun; it is the rat’s skin and skeleton in a compact bundle, which
+the owl rejects after having swallowed it.
+
+Some quieter day, on the edge of a southerly wind, perhaps, boats go
+out over the gray, sad water after sea-fowl,--the murres that swim
+in little companies, keeping just out of reach of shot, and are so
+spiteful that they beat the boat with their beaks, when wounded, in
+impotent rage, till they are despatched with an oar or another shot; or
+kittiwakes,--exquisite creatures like living forms of snow and cloud
+in color, with beaks and feet of dull gold,--that come when you wave a
+white handkerchief, and flutter almost within reach of your hand; or
+oldwives, called by the natives _scoldenores_, with clean white caps;
+or clumsy eider-ducks, or coots, or mergansers, or whatever they may
+find. Black ducks, of course, are often shot. Their jet-black, shining
+plumage is splendidly handsome, set off with the broad, flame-colored
+beak. Little auks, stormy-petrels, loons, grebes, lords-and-ladies,
+sea-pigeons, sea-parrots, various guillemots, and all sorts of gulls
+abound. Sometimes an eagle sweeps over; gannets pay occasional visits;
+the great blue heron is often seen in autumn and spring. One of the
+most striking birds is the cormorant, called here “shag”; from it
+the rock at Duck Island takes its name. It used to be an object of
+almost awful interest to me when I beheld it perched upon White Island
+Head,--a solemn figure, high and dark against the clouds. Once, while
+living on that island, in the thickest of a great storm in autumn, when
+we seemed to be set between two contending armies, deafened by the
+continuous cannonading of breakers, and lashed and beaten by winds
+and waters till it was almost impossible to hear ourselves speak, we
+became aware of another sound, which pierced to our ears, bringing a
+sudden terror lest it should be the voices of human beings. Opening the
+window a little, what a wild combination of sounds came shrieking in!
+A large flock of wild geese had settled for safety upon the rock, and
+completely surrounded us,--agitated, clamorous, weary. We might have
+secured any number of them, but it would have been a shameful thing.
+We were glad, indeed, that they should share our little foothold in
+that chaos, and they flew away unhurt when the tempest lulled. I was a
+very young child when this happened, but I never can forget that autumn
+night,--it seemed so wonderful and pitiful that those storm-beaten
+birds should have come crying to our rock; and the strange, wild
+chorus that swept in when the window was pried open a little took so
+strong a hold upon my imagination that I shall hear it as long as I
+live. The lighthouse, so beneficent to mankind, is the destroyer of
+birds,--of land birds particularly, though in thick weather sea-birds
+are occasionally bewildered into breaking their heads against the
+glass, plunging forward headlong towards the light, just as the frail
+moth of summer evenings madly seeks its death in the candle’s blaze.
+Sometimes in autumn, always in spring, when birds are migrating, they
+are destroyed in such quantities by this means that it is painful to
+reflect upon. The keeper living at the island three years ago told me
+that he picked up three hundred and seventy-five in one morning at the
+foot of the lighthouse, all dead. They fly with such force against the
+glass that their beaks are often splintered. The keeper said he found
+the destruction greatest in hazy weather, and he thought “they struck a
+ray at a great distance and followed it up.” Many a May morning have I
+wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower mourning over a little
+apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged
+blackbirds, many-colored warblers and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed
+yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet
+tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside,--enough to break the
+heart of a small child to think of! Once a great eagle flew against
+the lantern and shivered the glass. That was before I lived there; but
+after we came, two gulls cracked one of the large, clear panes, one
+stormy night.
+
+The sea-birds are comparatively few and shy at this time; but I
+remember when they were plentiful enough, when on Duck Island in
+summer the “medrakes,” or tern, made rude nests on the beach, and the
+little yellow gulls, just out of the eggs, ran tumbling about among
+the stones, hiding their foolish heads in every crack and cranny, and,
+like the ostrich, imagining themselves safe so long as they could not
+see the danger. And even now the sandpipers build in numbers on the
+islands, and the young birds, which look like tiny tufts of fog, run
+about among the bayberry-bushes, with sweet, scared piping. They are
+exquisitely beautiful and delicate, covered with a down just like
+gray mist, with brilliant black eyes, and slender, graceful legs
+that make one think of grass-stems. And here the loons congregate in
+spring and autumn. These birds seem to me the most human and at the
+same time the most demoniac of their kind. I learned to imitate their
+different cries; they are wonderful! At one time the loon language was
+so familiar that I could almost always summon a considerable flock by
+going down to the water and assuming the neighborly and conversational
+tone which they generally use: after calling a few minutes, first a
+far-off voice responded, then other voices answered him, and when this
+was kept up a while, half a dozen birds would come sailing in. It was
+the most delightful little party imaginable; so comical were they, so
+entertaining, that it was impossible not to laugh aloud,--and they
+could laugh too, in a way which chilled the marrow of one’s bones.
+They always laugh, when shot at, if they are missed; as the Shoalers
+say, “They laugh like a warrior.” But their long, wild, melancholy cry
+before a storm is the most awful note I ever heard from a bird. It is
+so sad, so hopeless,--a clear, high shriek, shaken, as it drops into
+silence, into broken notes that make you think of the fluttering of a
+pennon in the wind,--a shudder of sound. They invariably utter this cry
+before a storm.
+
+Between the gales from all points of the compass, that
+
+        “’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
+    Set roaring war,”
+
+some day there falls a dead calm; the whole expanse of the ocean is
+like a mirror; there’s not a whisper of a wave, not a sigh from any
+wind about the world,--an awful, breathless pause prevails. Then if
+a loon swims into the motionless little bights about the island, and
+raises his weird cry, the silent rocks re-echo the unearthly tone, and
+it seems as if the creature were in league with the mysterious forces
+that are so soon to turn this deathly stillness into confusion and
+dismay. All through the day the ominous quiet lasts; in the afternoon,
+while yet the sea is glassy, a curious undertone of mournful sound can
+be perceived,--not fitful,--a steady moan such as the wind makes over
+the mouth of an empty jar. Then the islanders say, “Do you hear Hog
+Island crying? Now look out for a storm!” No one knows how that low
+moaning is produced, or why Appledore, of all the islands, should alone
+lament before the tempest. Through its gorges, perhaps, some current
+of wind sighs with that hollow cry. Yet the sea could hardly keep its
+unruffled surface were a wind abroad sufficient to draw out the boding
+sound. Such a calm preceded the storm which destroyed the Minot’s Ledge
+Lighthouse in 1849. I never knew such silence. Though the sun blazed
+without a cloud, the sky and sea were utterly wan and colorless, and
+before sunset the mysterious tone began to vibrate in the breezeless
+air. “Hog Island’s crying!” said the islanders. One could but think
+of the Ancient Mariner, as the angry sun went down in a brassy glare,
+and still no ripple broke the calm. But with the twilight gathered the
+waiting wind, slowly and steadily; and before morning the shock of the
+breakers was like the incessant thundering of heavy guns; the solid
+rock perceptibly trembled; windows shook, and glass and china rattled
+in the house. It is impossible to describe the confusion, the tumult,
+the rush and roar and thunder of waves and wind overwhelming those
+rocks,--the whole Atlantic rushing headlong to cast itself upon them.
+It was very exciting: the most timid among us lost all sense of fear.
+Before the next night the sea had made a breach through the valley on
+Appledore, in which the houses stand,--a thing that never had happened
+within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The waves piled in from
+the eastward (where Old Harry was tossing the breakers sky-high),--a
+maddened troop of giants, sweeping everything before them,--and
+followed one another, white as milk, through the valley from east to
+west, strewing the space with boulders from a solid wall six feet high
+and as many thick, which ran across the top of the beach, and which
+one tremendous wave toppled over like a child’s fence of blocks. Kelp
+and sea-weed were piled in banks high up along the shore, and strewed
+the doorsteps; and thousands of the hideous creatures known among the
+Shoalers as sea-mice, a holothurian (a livid, shapeless mass of torpid
+life), were scattered in all directions. While the storm was at its
+height, it was impossible to do anything but watch it through windows
+beaten by the blinding spray which burst in flying clouds all over
+the island, drenching every inch of the soil in foaming brine. In the
+coves the “yeasty surges” were churned into yellow masses of foam, that
+blew across in trembling flakes, and clung wherever they lit, leaving
+a hoary scum of salt when dry, which remained till sweet, fair water
+dropped out of the clouds to wash it all away. It was long before the
+sea went down; and, days after the sun began to shine, the fringe of
+spray still leaped skyward from the eastern shore, and Shag and Mingo
+Rocks at Duck Island tossed their distant clouds of snow against the
+blue.
+
+After the wind subsided, it was curious to examine the effects of the
+breakers on the eastern shore, where huge masses of rock were struck
+off from the cliffs, and flung among the wild heaps of scattered
+boulders, to add to the already hopeless confusion of the gorges. The
+eastern aspects of the islands change somewhat every year or two from
+this cause; and, indeed, over all their surfaces continual change
+goes on from the action of the weather. Under the hammer and chisel
+of frost and heat, masses of stone are detached and fall from the
+edges of cliffs, whole ledges become disintegrated, the rock cracks
+in smooth, thin sheets, and, once loosened, the whole mass can be
+pulled out, sheet by sheet. Twenty years ago those subtle, irresistible
+tools of the weather had cracked off a large mass of rock from a ledge
+on the slope of a gentle declivity. I could just lay my hand in the
+space then: now three men can walk abreast between the ledge and the
+detached mass; and nothing has touched it save heat and cold. The whole
+aspect of the rocks is infinitely aged. I never can see the beautiful
+salutation of sunrise upon their hoary fronts, without thinking how
+many millions of times they have answered to that delicate touch.
+On Boone Island,--a low, dangerous rock fifteen miles east of the
+Shoals,--the sea has even greater opportunities of destruction, the
+island is so low. Once, after a stormy night, the lighthouse-keeper
+told me the family found a great stone, weighing half a ton, in the
+back entry, which Father Neptune had deposited there,--his card, with
+his compliments!
+
+Often tremendous breakers encompass the islands when the surface of the
+sea is perfectly calm and the weather serene and still,--the results
+of great storms far out at sea. A “long swell” swings indolently, and
+the ponderous waves roll in as if tired and half asleep, to burst
+into clouds of splendor against the cliffs. Very different is their
+hurried, eager breaking when the shoulder of a gale compels them. There
+is no sound more gentle, more slumberous, than the distant roll of
+these billows,--
+
+                   “The rolling sea resounding soft,”
+
+as Spenser has it. The rush of a fully alive and closely pursued
+breaker is, at a distance, precisely like that which a rocket makes,
+sweeping headlong upward through the air; but the other is a long and
+peaceful sigh, a dreamy, lulling, beautiful sound, which produces a
+Lethean forgetfulness of care and pain, makes all earthly ill seem
+unreal, and it is as if one wandered
+
+          “In dreamful wastes, where footless fancies dwell.”
+
+It requires a strong effort to emerge from this lotus-eating state of
+mind. O, lovely it is, on sunny afternoons to sit high up in a crevice
+of the rock and look down on the living magnificence of breakers such
+as made music about us after the Minot’s Ledge storm,--to watch them
+gather, one after another,
+
+                  “Cliffs of emerald topped with snow,
+                  That lift and lift, and then let go
+                  A great white avalanche of thunder,”
+
+which makes the solid earth tremble, and you, clinging to the moist
+rock, feel like a little cockle-shell! If you are out of the reach of
+the heavy fall of spray, the fine salt mist will still stream about
+you, and salute your cheek with the healthful freshness of the brine,
+make your hair damp, and encrust your eyebrows with salt. While you
+sit watching the shifting splendor, uprises at once a higher cloud
+than usual; and across it springs a sudden rainbow, like a beautiful
+thought beyond the reach of human expression. High over your head the
+white gulls soar, gathering the sunshine in the snowy hollows of their
+wings. As you look up to them floating in the fathomless blue, there
+is something awful in the purity of that arch beneath their wings, in
+light or shade, as the broad pinions move with stately grace. There
+is no bird so white,--nor swan, nor dove, nor mystic ibis: about the
+ocean-marges there is no dust to soil their perfect snow, and no stormy
+wind can ruffle their delicate plumes,--the beautiful, happy creatures!
+One never tires of watching them. Again and again appears the rainbow
+with lovely colors melting into each other and vanishing, to appear
+again at the next upspringing of the spray. On the horizon the white
+sails shine; and far and wide spreads the blue of the sea, with nothing
+between you and the eastern continent across its vast, calm plain.
+
+[Illustration: WHITE ISLAND.]
+
+I well remember my first sight of White Island, where we took up our
+abode on leaving the mainland. I was scarcely five years old; but from
+the upper windows of our dwelling in Portsmouth, I had been shown the
+clustered masts of ships lying at the wharves along the Piscataqua
+River, faintly outlined against the sky, and, baby as I was, even then
+I was drawn, with a vague longing, seaward. How delightful was that
+long, first sail to the Isles of Shoals! How pleasant the unaccustomed
+sound of the incessant ripple against the boat-side, the sight of the
+wide water and limitless sky, the warmth of the broad sunshine that
+made us blink like young sandpipers as we sat in triumph, perched
+among the household goods with which the little craft was laden! It
+was at sunset in autumn that we were set ashore on that loneliest,
+lovely rock, where the lighthouse looked down on us like some tall,
+black-capped giant, and filled me with awe and wonder. At its base a
+few goats were grouped on the rock, standing out dark against the red
+sky as I looked up at them. The stars were beginning to twinkle; the
+wind blew cold, charged with the sea’s sweetness; the sound of many
+waters half bewildered me. Some one began to light the lamps in the
+tower. Rich red and golden, they swung round in mid-air; everything was
+strange and fascinating and new. We entered the quaint little old
+stone cottage that was for six years our home. How curious it seemed,
+with its low, whitewashed ceiling and deep window-seats, showing the
+great thickness of the walls made to withstand the breakers, with
+whose force we soon grew acquainted! A blissful home the little house
+became to the children who entered it that quiet evening and slept
+for the first time lulled by the murmur of the encircling sea. I do
+not think a happier triad ever existed than we were, living in that
+profound isolation. It takes so little to make a healthy child happy;
+and we never wearied of our few resources. True, the winters seemed
+as long as a whole year to our little minds, but they were pleasant,
+nevertheless. Into the deep window-seats we climbed, and with pennies
+(for which we had no other use) made round holes in the thick frost,
+breathing on them till they were warm, and peeped out at the bright,
+fierce, windy weather, watching the vessels scudding over the intensely
+dark blue sea, all “feather-white” where the short waves broke hissing
+in the cold, and the sea-fowl soaring aloft or tossing on the water;
+or, in calmer days, we saw how the stealthy Star-Islander paddled among
+the ledges, or lay for hours stretched on the wet sea-weed, with his
+gun, watching for wild-fowl. Sometimes the round head of a seal moved
+about among the kelp-covered rocks. A few are seen every winter, and
+are occasionally shot; but they are shyer and more alert even than the
+birds.
+
+We were forced to lay in stores of all sorts in the autumn, as if we
+were fitting out a ship for an Arctic expedition. The lower story of
+the lighthouse was hung with mutton and beef, and the store-room packed
+with provisions.
+
+In the long, covered walk that bridged the gorge between the lighthouse
+and the house, we played in stormy days; and every evening it was a
+fresh excitement to watch the lighting of the lamps, and think how far
+the lighthouse sent its rays, and how many hearts it gladdened with
+assurance of safety. As I grew older I was allowed to kindle the lamps
+sometimes myself. That was indeed a pleasure. So little a creature as
+I might do that much for the great world! But by the fireside our best
+pleasure lay,--with plants and singing birds and books and playthings
+and loving care and kindness the cold and stormy season wore itself at
+last away, and died into the summer calm. We hardly saw a human face
+beside our own all winter; but with the spring came manifold life to
+our lonely dwelling,--human life among other forms. Our neighbors
+from Star rowed across; the pilot-boat from Portsmouth steered over,
+and brought us letters, newspapers, magazines, and told us the news
+of months. The faint echoes from the far-off world hardly touched us
+little ones. We listened to the talk of our elders. “Winfield Scott and
+Santa Anna!” “The war in Mexico!” “The famine in Ireland!” It all meant
+nothing to us. We heard the reading aloud of details of the famine,
+and saw tears in the eyes of the reader, and were vaguely sorry; but
+the fate of Red Riding-Hood was much more near and dreadful to us. We
+waited for the spring with an eager longing; the advent of the growing
+grass, the birds and flowers and insect life, the soft skies and softer
+winds, the everlasting beauty of the thousand tender tints that clothed
+the world,--these things brought us unspeakable bliss. To the heart of
+Nature one must needs be drawn in such a life; and very soon I learned
+how richly she repays in deep refreshment the reverent love of her
+worshipper. With the first warm days we built our little mountains of
+wet gravel on the beach, and danced after the sandpipers at the edge
+of the foam, shouted to the gossiping kittiwakes that fluttered above,
+or watched the pranks of the burgomaster gull, or cried to the crying
+loons. The gannet’s long, white wings stretched overhead, perhaps, or
+the dusky shag made a sudden shadow in mid-air, or we startled on some
+lonely ledge the great blue heron that flew off, trailing legs and
+wings, stork-like, against the clouds. Or, in the sunshine on the bare
+rocks, we cut from the broad, brown leaves of the slippery, varnished
+kelps, grotesque shapes of man and bird and beast that withered in the
+wind and blew away; or we fashioned rude boats from bits of driftwood,
+manned them with a weird crew of kelpies, and set them adrift on the
+great deep, to float we cared not whither.
+
+We played with the empty limpet-shells; they were mottled gray and
+brown, like the song-sparrow’s breast. We launched fleets of purple
+mussel-shells on the still pools in the rocks, left by the tide,--pools
+that were like bits of fallen rainbow with the wealth of the sea, with
+tints of delicate sea-weeds, crimson and green and ruddy brown and
+violet; where wandered the pearly eolis with rosy spines and fairy
+horns; and the large, round sea-urchins, like a boss upon a shield,
+were fastened here and there on the rock at the bottom, putting out
+from their green, prickly spikes transparent tentacles to seek their
+invisible food. Rosy and lilac star-fish clung to the sides; in some
+dark nook, perhaps, a holothure unfolded its perfect ferns, a lovely,
+warm buff color, delicate as frost-work; little forests of coralline
+moss grew up in stillness, gold-colored shells crept about, and now
+and then flashed the silver-darting fins of slender minnows. The
+dimmest recesses were haunts of sea-anemones that opened wide their
+starry flowers to the flowing tide, or drew themselves together, and
+hung in large, half-transparent drops, like clusters of some strange,
+amber-colored fruit, along the crevices as the water ebbed away.
+Sometimes we were cruel enough to capture a female lobster hiding in
+a deep cleft, with her millions of mottled eggs; or we laughed to see
+the hermit-crabs challenge each other, and come out and fight a deadly
+battle till the stronger overcame, and, turning the weaker topsy-turvy,
+possessed himself of his ampler cockle-shell, and scuttled off with it
+triumphant. Or, pulling all together, we dragged up the long kelps, or
+devil’s-aprons; their roots were almost always fastened about large,
+living mussels; these we unclasped, carrying the mussels home to be
+cooked; fried in crumbs or batter, they were as good as oysters. We
+picked out from the kelp-roots a kind of star-fish which we called
+sea-spider; the moment we touched it an extraordinary process began.
+One by one it disjointed all its sections,--whether from fear or anger
+we knew not; but it threw itself away, bit by bit, until nothing was
+left of it save the little, round body whence the legs had sprung!
+
+With crab and limpet, with grasshopper and cricket, we were friends
+and neighbors, and we were never tired of watching the land-spiders
+that possessed the place. Their webs covered every window-pane to
+the lighthouse top, and they rebuilt them as fast as they were swept
+down. One variety lived among the round gray stones on the beach,
+just above high-water mark, and spun no webs at all. Large and black,
+they speckled the light stones, swarming in the hot sun; at the first
+footfall they vanished beneath the pebbles.
+
+All the cracks in the rocks were draped with swinging veils like the
+window-panes. How often have we marvelled at them, after a fog or a
+heavy fall of dew, in the early morning, when every slender thread was
+strung with glittering drops,--the whole symmetrical web a wonder of
+shining jewels trembling in the breeze! Tennyson’s lines,
+
+    “The cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat
+    Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more,”
+
+always bring back to my mind the memory of those delicate, spangled
+draperies, more beautiful than any mortal loom could weave, that
+curtained the rocks at White Island and “shook their threaded tears” in
+every wind.
+
+Sometimes we saw the bats wheel through the summer dusk, and in
+profoundly silent evenings heard, from the lighthouse top, their
+shrill, small cries, their voices sharper and finer than needle-points.
+One day I found one clinging to the under side of a shutter,--a soft,
+dun-colored, downy lump. I took it in my hand, and in an instant it
+changed to a hideous little demon, and its fierce white teeth met
+in the palm of my hand. So much fury in so small a beast I never
+encountered, and I was glad enough to give him his liberty without more
+ado.
+
+A kind of sandhopper about an inch long, that infested the beach, was
+a great source of amusement. Lifting the stranded sea-weed that marked
+the high-water line, we always startled a gray and brown cloud of them
+from beneath it, leaping away, like tiny kangaroos, out of sight. In
+storms these were driven into the house, forcing their way through
+every crack and cranny till they strewed the floors,--the sea so
+encircled us! Dying immediately upon leaving the water from which they
+fled, they turned from a clear brown, or what Mr. Kingsley would call
+a “pellucid gray,” to bright brick-color, like a boiled lobster, and
+many a time I have swept them up in ruddy heaps; they looked like bits
+of coral.
+
+I remember in the spring kneeling on the ground to seek the first
+blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into
+the house to study and wonder over. Better than a shop full of toys
+they were to me! Whence came their color? How did they draw their
+sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or
+the white light? Chemistry was not at hand to answer me, and all her
+wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. Later the little scarlet
+pimpernel charmed me. It seemed more than a flower; it was like a human
+thing. I knew it by its homely name of poor-man’s weather-glass. It
+was so much wiser than I, for, when the sky was yet without a cloud,
+softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden
+heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come! How could it
+know so much? Here is a question science cannot answer. The pimpernel
+grows everywhere about the islands, in every cleft and cranny where
+a suspicion of sustenance for its slender root can lodge; and it is
+one of the most exquisite of flowers, so rich in color, so quaint
+and dainty in its method of growth. I never knew its silent warning
+fail. I wondered much how every flower knew what to do and to be;
+why the morning-glory didn’t forget sometimes, and bear a cluster of
+elder-bloom, or the elder hang out pennons of gold and purple like the
+iris, or the golden-rod suddenly blaze out a scarlet plume, the color
+of the pimpernel, was a mystery to my childish thought. And why did the
+sweet wild primrose wait till after sunset to unclose its pale yellow
+buds; why did it unlock its treasure of rich perfume to the night
+alone? Few flowers bloomed for me upon the lonesome rock; but I made
+the most of all I had, and neither knew of nor desired more. Ah, how
+beautiful they were! Tiny stars of crimson sorrel threaded on their
+long brown stems; the blackberry blossoms in bridal white; the surprise
+of the blue-eyed grass; the crowfoot flowers, like drops of yellow
+gold spilt about among the short grass and over the moss; the rich,
+blue-purple beach-pea, the sweet, spiked germander, and the homely,
+delightful yarrow that grows thickly on all the islands. Sometimes its
+broad clusters of dull white bloom are stained a lovely reddish-purple,
+as if with the light of sunset. I never saw it colored so elsewhere.
+Quantities of slender, wide-spreading mustard-bushes grew about
+the house; their delicate flowers were like fragrant golden clouds.
+Dandelions, buttercups, and clover were not denied to us; though we
+had no daisies nor violets nor wild roses, no asters, but gorgeous
+spikes of golden-rod, and wonderful wild morning-glories, whose long,
+pale, ivory buds I used to find in the twilight, glimmering among the
+dark leaves, waiting for the touch of dawn to unfold and become each
+an exquisite incarnate blush,--the perfect color of a South Sea shell.
+They ran wild, knotting and twisting about the rocks, and smothering
+the loose boulders in the gorges with lush green leaves and pink
+blossoms.
+
+Many a summer morning have I crept out of the still house before any
+one was awake, and, wrapping myself closely from the chill wind of
+dawn, climbed to the top of the high cliff called the Head to watch
+the sunrise. Pale grew the lighthouse flame before the broadening day
+as, nestled in a crevice at the cliff’s edge, I watched the shadows
+draw away and morning break. Facing the east and south, with all the
+Atlantic before me, what happiness was mine as the deepening rose-color
+flushed the delicate cloudflocks that dappled the sky, where the gulls
+soared, rosy too, while the calm sea blushed beneath. Or perhaps it
+was a cloudless sunrise with a sky of orange-red, and the sea-line
+silver-blue against it, peaceful as heaven. Infinite variety of beauty
+always awaited me, and filled me with an absorbing, unreasoning joy
+such as makes the song-sparrow sing,--a sense of perfect bliss. Coming
+back in the sunshine, the morning-glories would lift up their faces,
+all awake, to my adoring gaze. Like countless rosy trumpets sometimes
+I thought they were, tossed everywhere about the rocks, turned up to
+the sky, or drooping toward the ground, or looking east, west, north,
+south, in silent loveliness. It seemed as if they had gathered the
+peace of the golden morning in their still depths even as my heart had
+gathered it.
+
+In some of those matchless summer mornings when I went out to milk the
+little dun cow, it was hardly possible to go farther than the doorstep,
+for pure wonder, as I looked abroad at the sea lying still, like a
+vast, round mirror, the tide drawn away from the rich brown rocks, a
+sail or two asleep in the calm, not a sound abroad except a few bird
+voices; dew lying like jewel-dust sifted over everything,--diamond
+and ruby, sapphire, topaz, and amethyst, flashing out of the emerald
+deeps of the tufted grass or from the bending tops. Looking over to
+the mainland, I could dimly discern in the level sunshine the depths
+of glowing green woods faintly revealed in the distance, fold beyond
+fold of hill and valley thickly clothed with the summer’s splendor.
+But my handful of grass was more precious to me than miles of green
+fields, and I was led to consider every blade where there were so few.
+Not long ago I had watched them piercing the ground toward the light;
+now, how strong in their slender grace were these stems, how perfect
+the poise of the heavy heads that waved with such harmony of movement
+in the faintest breeze! And I noticed at mid-day when the dew was dry,
+where the tall, blossoming spears stood in graceful companies that,
+before they grew purple, brown, and ripe, when they began to blossom,
+they put out first a downy ring of pollen in tiny, yellow rays, held by
+an almost invisible thread, which stood out like an aureole from each
+slow-waving head,--a fairy-like effect. On Seavey’s Island (united to
+ours by a narrow beach covered at high tide with contending waves) grew
+one single root of fern, the only one within the circle of my little
+world. It was safe in a deep cleft, but I was in perpetual anxiety lest
+my little cow, going there daily to pasture, should leave her cropping
+of the grass and eat it up some day. Poor little cow! One night she did
+not come home to be milked as usual, and on going to seek her we found
+she had caught one foot in a crevice and twisted her hoof entirely off!
+That was a calamity; for we were forced to summon our neighbors and
+have her killed on the spot.
+
+I had a scrap of garden, literally not more than a yard square, wherein
+grew only African marigolds, rich in color as barbaric gold. I knew
+nothing of John Keats at that time,--poor Keats, “who told Severn that
+he thought his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth
+of flowers,”--but I am sure he never felt their beauty more devoutly
+than the little, half-savage being who knelt, like a fire-worshipper,
+to watch the unfolding of those golden disks. When, later, the “brave
+new world” of poets was opened to me, with what power those glowing
+lines of his went straight to my heart,
+
+        “Open afresh your rounds of starry folds,
+        Ye ardent marigolds!”
+
+All flowers had for me such human interest, they were so dear and
+precious, I hardly liked to gather them, and when they were withered,
+I carried them all to one place and laid them tenderly together, and
+never liked to pass the spot where they were hidden.
+
+Once or twice every year came the black, lumbering old “oil-schooner”
+that brought supplies for the lighthouse, and the inspector, who
+gravely examined everything, to see if all was in order. He left stacks
+of clear red and white glass chimneys for the lamps, and several
+doe-skins for polishing the great, silver-lined copper reflectors,
+large bundles of wicks, and various pairs of scissors for trimming
+them, heavy black casks of ill-perfumed whale-oil, and other things,
+which were all stowed in the round, dimly-lighted rooms of the tower.
+Very awe-struck, we children always crept into corners, and whispered
+and watched the intruders till they embarked in their ancient, clumsy
+vessel, and, hoisting their dark, weather-stained sails, bore slowly
+away again. About ten years ago that old white lighthouse was taken
+away, and a new, perpendicular brick tower built in its place. The
+lantern, with its fifteen lamps, ten golden and five red, gave place
+to Fresnel’s powerful single burner, or, rather, three burners in one,
+enclosed in its case of prisms. The old lighthouse was by far the most
+picturesque; but perhaps the new one is more effective, the light
+being, undoubtedly, more powerful.
+
+Often, in pleasant days, the head of the family sailed away to visit
+the other islands, sometimes taking the children with him, oftener
+going alone, frequently not returning till after dark. The landing
+at White Island is so dangerous that the greatest care is requisite,
+if there is any sea running, to get ashore in safety. Two long and
+very solid timbers about three feet apart are laid from the boat-house
+to low-water mark, and between those timbers the boat’s bow must be
+accurately steered; if she goes to the right or the left, woe to her
+crew unless the sea is calm! Safely lodged in the slip, as it is
+called, she is drawn up into the boat-house by a capstan, and fastened
+securely. The lighthouse gave no ray to the dark rock below it;
+sending its beams far out to sea, it left us at its foot in greater
+darkness for its lofty light. So when the boat was out late, in soft,
+moonless summer nights, I used to light a lantern, and, going down to
+the water’s edge, take my station between the timbers of the slip,
+and, with the lantern at my feet, sit waiting in the darkness, quite
+content, knowing my little star was watched for, and that the safety of
+the boat depended in a great measure upon it. How sweet the summer wind
+blew, how softly plashed the water round me, how refreshing was the
+odor of the sparkling brine! High above, the lighthouse rays streamed
+out into the humid dark, and the cottage windows were ruddy from the
+glow within. I felt so much a part of the Lord’s universe, I was no
+more afraid of the dark than the waves or winds; but I was glad to
+hear at last the creaking of the mast and the rattling of the rowlocks
+as the boat approached; and, while yet she was far off, the lighthouse
+touched her one large sail into sight, so that I knew she was nearing
+me, and shouted, listening for the reply that came so blithely back to
+me over the water.
+
+Unafraid, too, we watched the summer tempests, and listened to the
+deep, melodious thunder rolling away over the rain-calmed ocean. The
+lightning played over the iron rods that ran from the lighthouse-top
+down into the sea. Where it lay on the sharp ridgepole of the long,
+covered walk that spanned the gorge, the strange fire ran up the spikes
+that were set at equal distances, and burnt like pale flame from their
+tips. It was fine indeed from the lighthouse itself to watch the storm
+come rushing over the sea and ingulf us in our helplessness. How the
+rain weltered down over the great panes of plate glass,--floods of
+sweet, fresh water that poured off the rocks and mingled with the
+bitter brine. I wondered why the fresh floods never made the salt
+sea any sweeter. Those pale flames that we beheld burning from the
+spikes of the lightning-rod, I suppose were identical with the St.
+Elmo’s fire that I have since seen described as haunting the spars of
+ships in thunder-storms. And here I am reminded of a story told by
+some gentlemen visiting Appledore sixteen or eighteen years ago. They
+started from Portsmouth for the Shoals in a whaleboat, one evening in
+summer, with a native Star-Islander, Richard Randall by name, to manage
+the boat. They had sailed about half the distance, when they were
+surprised at seeing a large ball of fire, like a rising moon, rolling
+toward them over the sea from the south. They watched it eagerly as it
+bore down upon them, and, veering off, went east of them at some little
+distance, and then passed astern, and there, of course, they expected
+to lose sight of it; but while they were marvelling and speculating,
+it altered its course, and suddenly began to near them, coming back
+upon its track against the wind and steadily following in their wake.
+This was too much for the native Shoaler. He took off his jacket and
+turned it inside out to exorcise the fiend, and lo, the apparition most
+certainly disappeared! We heard the excited account of the strange
+gentlemen and witnessed the holy horror of the boatman on the occasion;
+but no one could imagine what had set the globe of fire rolling
+across the sea. Some one suggested that it might be an exhalation, a
+phosphorescent light, from the decaying body of some dead fish; but in
+that case it must have been taken in tow by some living finny creature,
+else how could it have sailed straight “into the teeth of the wind”? It
+was never satisfactorily accounted for, and must remain a mystery.
+
+One autumn at White Island our little boat had been to Portsmouth for
+provisions, etc. With the spy-glass we watched her returning, beating
+against the head wind. The day was bright, but there had been a storm
+at sea, and the breakers rolled and roared about us. The process of
+“beating” is so tedious that, though the boat had started in the
+morning, the sun was sending long yellow light from the west before it
+reached the island. There was no cessation in those resistless billows
+that rolled from the Devil’s Rock upon the slip; but still the little
+craft sailed on, striving to reach the landing. The hand at the tiller
+was firm, but a huge wave swept suddenly in, swerving the boat to the
+left of the slip, and in a moment she was overturned and flung upon
+the rocks, and her only occupant tossed high upon the beach, safe
+except for a few bruises; but what a moment of terror it was for us
+all, who saw and could not save! All the freight was lost except a roll
+of iron wire and a barrel of walnuts. These were spread on the floor
+of an unoccupied eastern chamber in the cottage to dry. And they did
+dry; but before they were gathered up came a terrible storm from the
+southeast. It raved and tore at lighthouse and cottage; the sea broke
+into the windows of that eastern chamber where the walnuts lay, and
+washed them out till they came dancing down the stairs in briny foam!
+The sea broke the windows of the house several times during our stay
+at the lighthouse. Everything shook so violently from the concussion
+of the breakers, that dishes on the closet shelves fell to the floor,
+and one member of the family was at first always made sea-sick in
+storms, by the tremor and deafening confusion. One night when, from
+the southeast, the very soul of chaos seemed to have been let loose
+upon the world, the whole ponderous “walk” (the covered bridge that
+connected the house and lighthouse) was carried thundering down the
+gorge and dragged out into the raging sea.
+
+It was a distressing situation for us,--cut off from the precious light
+that must be kept alive; for the breakers were tearing through the
+gorge so that no living thing could climb across. But the tide could
+not resist the mighty impulse that drew it down; it was forced to obey
+the still voice that bade it ebb; all swollen and raging and towering
+as it was, slowly and surely, at the appointed time, it sank away from
+our rock, so that, between the billows that still strove to clutch
+at the white, silent, golden-crowned tower, one could creep across,
+and scale the height, and wind up the machinery that kept the great
+clustered light revolving till the gray daylight broke to extinguish it.
+
+I often wondered how it was possible for the sea-birds to live through
+such storms as these. But, when one could see at all, the gulls were
+always soaring, in the wildest tumult, and the stormy petrels half
+flying, half swimming in the hollows of the waves.
+
+Would it were possible to describe the beauty of the calm that followed
+such tempests! The long lines of silver foam that streaked the tranquil
+blue, the “tender-curving lines of creamy spray” along the shore,
+the clear-washed sky, the peaceful yellow light, the mellow breakers
+murmuring slumberously!
+
+Of all the storms our childish eyes watched with delighted awe, one
+thunder-storm remains fixed in my memory. Late in an August afternoon
+it rolled its awful clouds to the zenith, and, after the tumult had
+subsided, spread its lightened vapors in an under-roof of gray over
+all the sky. Presently this solemn gray lid was lifted at its western
+edge, and an insufferable splendor streamed across the world from
+the sinking sun. The whole heaven was in a blaze of scarlet, across
+which sprang a rainbow unbroken to the topmost clouds, “with its seven
+perfect colors chorded in a triumph” against the flaming background;
+the sea answered the sky’s rich blush, and the gray rocks lay drowned
+in melancholy purple. I hid my face from the glory,--it was too much to
+bear. Ever I longed to _speak_ these things that made life so sweet,
+to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird’s flight, the sea’s murmur. A
+vain longing! I might as well have sighed for the mighty pencil of
+Michael Angelo to wield in my impotent child’s hand. Better to “hush
+and bless one’s self with silence”; but ever the wish grew. Facing the
+July sunsets, deep red and golden through and through, or watching the
+summer northern lights,--battalions of brilliant streamers advancing
+and retreating, shooting upward to the zenith, and glowing like fiery
+veils before the stars; or when the fog-bow spanned the silver mist of
+morning, or the earth and sea lay shimmering in a golden haze of noon;
+in storm or calm, by day or night, the manifold aspects of Nature held
+me and swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be silent any
+longer, and I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only
+aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and
+broken the notes might be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It has been my good fortune to witness but few wrecks at the Shoals.
+The disasters of which we hear faintly from the past were many and
+dreadful; but since the building of the lighthouse on White Island,
+and also on Boone Island (which seems like a neighbor, though fifteen
+miles distant), the danger of the place is much lessened. A resident
+of Star Island told me of a wreck which took place forty-seven years
+ago, during a heavy storm from the eastward. It blew so that all the
+doors in the house opened as fast as they shut them, and in the night
+a vessel drove against “Hog Island Head,” which fronts the village
+on Star. She went to pieces utterly. In the morning the islanders
+perceived the beach at Londoners heaped with some kind of drift; they
+could not make out what it was, but, as soon as the sea subsided, went
+to examine and found a mass of oranges and picture-frames, with which
+the vessel had been freighted. Not a soul was saved. “She struck with
+such force that she drove a large spike out of her forefoot” into a
+crevice in the rock, which was plainly to be seen till a few years
+ago. My informant also told me that she remembered the wreck of the
+Sagunto, in 1813; that the beaches were strewn with “almond-nuts”
+long after; and that she picked up curiously embroidered vests and
+“work-bags” in all directions along the shores.
+
+During a storm in 1839, while living at White Island, we were startled
+by the heavy booming of guns through the roar of the tempest,--a sound
+that drew nearer and nearer, till at last, through a sudden break in
+the mist and spray, we saw the heavily rolling hull of a large vessel
+driving by, to her sure destruction, toward the coast. It was as if the
+wind had torn the vapor apart on purpose to show us this piteous sight;
+and I well remember the hand on my shoulder which held me firmly,
+shuddering child that I was, and forced me to look in spite of myself.
+What a day of pain it was! how dreadful the sound of those signal-guns,
+and how much more dreadful the certainty, when they ceased, that
+all was over! We learned afterward that it was the brig Pocahontas,
+homeward bound from Spain, and that the vessel and all her crew were
+lost. In later years a few coasters and fishermen have gone ashore at
+the islands, generally upon the hidden ledges at Duck. Many of these
+have been loaded with lime,--a most perilous freight; for as soon as
+the water touches it there is a double danger; and between fire and
+water there is little chance of escape.
+
+I wish I could recall the graphic language of a Star Islander who
+described to me a wreck of this kind. The islanders saw at sunrise, one
+bitter winter day, a schooner ashore among the dreadful ledges at Duck
+Island, and, though the wind blew half a gale, they took their boats
+and ran down toward her before the northwester. Smoke and steam and
+spray and flame were rising from her and about her when they reached
+the spot. Only one man was found alive. From the davits, hanging head
+downward, was the lifeless body of a fair-haired boy of sixteen or
+thereabouts. The breakers swept him to and fro, and, drawing away,
+left his long yellow hair dripping with the freezing brine. The mate’s
+story was that he had gone to unfasten the boat which hung at the
+stern, that a sea had struck him, and he had fallen headforemost with
+his feet entangled in the ropes of the davits. He was the only son of
+his mother, who was a widow. They carried his body home to that most
+unhappy mother. The vessel was a total loss, with all on board, except
+the mate.
+
+One winter night at Appledore when it was blowing very hard northwest,
+with a clear sky, we were wakened by a violent knocking at the door.
+So unaccustomed a sound, at that time of night too, was enough to
+startle us all, and very much amazed we were. The door was opened to
+admit four or five shipwrecked men, whose hands, feet, and ears were
+all frozen stiff,--pitiable objects they were indeed. Their vessel had
+struck full on York Ledge, a rock lying off the coast of Maine far east
+of us, and they had taken to the boat and strove to make a landing on
+the coast; but the wind blew off shore so fiercely they failed in their
+attempt, their hands became useless from the cold, they dropped their
+oars, and, half steering with one of the seats of the boat, managed
+to reach Appledore, more dead than alive. They were obliged to remain
+there several days before finding an opportunity of going on shore, the
+gale was so furious. Next morning, in the glare of the winter sunshine,
+we saw their vessel, still with all sail set, standing upright upon
+the ledge,--a white column looming far away. One of the most hideous
+experiences I have heard befell a young Norwegian now living at the
+Shoals. He and a young companion came out from Portsmouth to set their
+trawl, in the winter fishing, two years ago. Before they reached the
+island, came a sudden squall of wind and snow, chilling and blinding.
+In a few moments they knew not where they were, and the wind continued
+to sweep them away. Presently they found themselves under the lee of
+White Island Head; they threw out the road-lines of their trawl, in
+desperate hope that they might hold the boat till the squall abated.
+The keepers at the lighthouse saw the poor fellows, but were powerless
+to help them. Alas! the road-lines soon broke, and the little boat was
+swept off again, they knew not whither. Night came down upon them,
+tossed on that terrible black sea; the snow ceased, the clouds flew
+before the deadly cold northwest wind, the thermometer sank below zero.
+One of the men died before morning; the other, alone with the dead man,
+was still driven on and on before the pitiless gale. He had no cap nor
+mittens; had lost both. He bailed the boat incessantly, for the sea
+broke over him the livelong time. He told me the story himself. He
+looked down at the awful face of his dead friend and thought “how soon
+he should be like him”; but still he never ceased bailing,--it was all
+he could do. Before night he passed Cape Cod and knew it as he rushed
+by. Another unspeakably awful night, and the gale abated no whit. Next
+morning he was almost gone from cold, fatigue, and hunger. His eyes
+were so swollen he could hardly see; but afar off, shining whiter than
+silver in the sun, the sails of a large schooner appeared at the edge
+of the fearful wilderness. He managed to hoist a bit of old canvas on
+an oar. He was then not far from Holmes’ Hole, nearly two hundred miles
+from the Shoals! The schooner saw it and bore down for him, but the
+sea was running so high that he expected to be swamped every instant.
+As she swept past, they threw from the deck a rope with a loop at the
+end, tied with a bow-line knot that would not slip. It caught him over
+the head, and clutching it at his throat with both hands, in an instant
+he found himself in the sea among the ice-cold, furious waves, drawn
+toward the vessel with all the strength of her crew. Just before he
+emerged, he heard the captain shout, “We’ve lost him!” Ah the bitter
+moment! For a horrible fear struck through him that they might lose
+their hold an instant on the rope, and then he knew it would be all
+over. But they saved him. The boat with the dead man in it, all alone,
+went tossing, heaven knows where.
+
+The great equinoctial gale of September 8, 1869, was very severe at the
+islands. One schooner went ashore on Cannon Point at Appledore, and
+was a complete wreck, though no lives were lost. She was lying in “The
+Roads,” between Star and Appledore, safely moored, her crew supposed;
+but she dragged moorings, anchors, everything with which they strove
+to save her, and crashed on the rocks, breaking up like an eggshell.
+Various buildings were blown down; windows at Appledore were blown in,
+in some cases sash and all, in others the glass was smashed as if the
+wind had thrust an arm through.
+
+At about seven o’clock in the evening a great copper-colored arch
+spanned the black sky from west to east. The gale was then at its
+height. After that lurid bow dissolved, flying northward in wild,
+scattered fragments, the wind abated, and we began to take breath
+again. A man at Star, on the edge of the storm, rowed out in his dory
+to make more secure a larger boat moored at a little distance. Down
+came the hurricane and caught him, and whirled him away like a dead
+leaf on the surface of the sea. He gave himself up for lost, of course;
+so did his friends. But he fastened himself with ropes to the inside of
+the boat, and, tossing from billow to billow, bailed for dear life the
+whole night long. Toward morning, the wind lulling very considerably,
+he was carried along the coast of Maine, and landed in York, a short
+distance from his father’s home, and quietly walked into the house and
+joined the family at breakfast; then took the cars for Portsmouth, and
+astounded the whole Shoals settlement by appearing in the steamer
+Appledore in time for dinner. Everybody supposed him, without a shadow
+of doubt, to be at the bottom of the sea.
+
+Boone Island is the forlornest place that can be imagined. The Isles of
+Shoals, barren as they are, seem like Gardens of Eden in comparison. I
+chanced to hear last summer of a person who had been born and brought
+up there; he described the loneliness as something absolutely fearful,
+and declared it had pursued him all through his life. He lived there
+till fourteen or fifteen years old, when his family moved to York.
+While living on the island he discovered some human remains which
+had lain there thirty years. A carpenter and his assistants, having
+finished some building, were capsized in getting off, and all were
+drowned, except the master. One body floated to Plum Island at the
+mouth of the Merrimack; the others the master secured, made a box for
+them,--all alone the while,--and buried them in a cleft and covered
+them with stones. These stones the sea washed away, and, thirty years
+after they were buried, the boy found the bones, which were removed
+to York and there buried again. It was on board a steamer bound to
+Bangor, that the man told his story. Boone Island Light was shining
+in the distance. He spoke with bitterness of his life in that terrible
+solitude, and of “the loneliness which had pursued him ever since.”
+All his relatives were dead, he said, and he had no human tie in the
+wide world except his wife. He ended by anathematizing all islands,
+and, vanishing into the darkness, was not to be found again; nor did
+his name or any trace of him transpire, though he was sought for in the
+morning all about the vessel.
+
+One of the most shocking stories of shipwreck I remember to have heard
+is that of the Nottingham Galley, wrecked on this island in the year
+1710. There is a narrative of this shipwreck existing, written by
+“John Deane, then commander of said Galley, but for many years after
+his Majesty’s consul for the ports of Flanders, residing at Ostend,”
+printed in 1762. The ship, of one hundred and twenty tons, carrying
+ten guns, with a crew of fourteen men, loaded partly in England and
+partly in Ireland, and sailed for Boston on the 25th of September,
+1710. She made land on the 11th of December, and was wrecked on that
+fatal rock. At first the unhappy crew “treated each other with kindness
+and condolence, and prayed to God for relief.” The only things saved
+from the wreck were a bit of canvas and half a cheese. The men made
+a triangular tent of the bit of canvas, and all lay close together
+beneath it, sideways; none could turn without the general concurrence:
+they turned once in two hours upon public notice. They had no fire,
+and lived upon kelp and rockweed, and mussels, three a day to a man.
+Starvation and suffering soon produced a curious loss of memory. The
+fourth day the cook died. When they had been there upwards of a week,
+they saw three sails in the southwest, but no boat came near them.
+They built a rude boat of such materials as they could gather from
+the wreck, but she was lost in launching. One of the men, a Swede, is
+particularly mentioned; he seems to have been full of energy; with
+help from the others he built a raft; in launching this they overset
+it. Again they saw a sail, this time coming out from the Piscataqua
+River; it was soon out of sight. The Swede was determined to make
+an effort to reach the shore, and persuaded another man to make the
+attempt with him. At sunset they were seen half-way to the land; the
+raft was found on shore with the body of one man; the Swede was never
+seen more. A hide was thrown on the rocks at Boone Island by the sea;
+this the poor sailors ate raw, minced. About the end of December the
+carpenter died, and, driven to madness by hunger, they devoured the
+flesh of their dead comrade. The captain, being the strongest of the
+party, dragged the body away and hid it, and dealt small portions of it
+daily to the men. Immediately their dispositions underwent a horrible
+change. They became fierce and reckless, and were the most pitiable
+objects of despair, when, on January 4th, 1711, they were discovered
+and taken off. It was evening when they entered the Piscataqua River,
+and eight o’clock when they landed. Discovering a house through the
+darkness, the master rushed into it, frightening the gentlewoman and
+children desperately, and, making his way to the kitchen, snatched
+the pot wherein some food was cooking off the fire, and began to eat
+voraciously. This old record mentions John Plaisted and John Wentworth
+as being most “forward in benevolence” to these poor fellows.
+
+When visiting the island for the first time, a few years ago, I was
+shown the shallow gorge where the unfortunates tried to shelter
+themselves. It was the serenest of summer days; everything smiled and
+shone as I stood looking down into that rocky hollow. Near by the
+lighthouse sprang--a splendid piece of masonry--over a hundred feet
+into the air, to hold its warning aloft. About its base some gentle
+thought had caused morning-glories to climb and unfold their violet,
+white, and rosy bells against the smooth, dark stone. I thought I had
+never seen flowers so beautiful. There was hardly a handful of grass
+on the island, hardly soil enough to hold a root; therefore it seemed
+the more wonderful to behold this lovely apparition. With my mind full
+of the story of the Nottingham Galley, I looked at the delicate bells,
+the cool green leaves, the whole airy grace of the wandering vines, and
+it was as if a hand were stretched out to pluck me away from the awful
+questions never to be answered this side the grave, that pressed so
+heavily while I thought how poor humanity had here suffered the utmost
+misery that it is possible to endure.
+
+The aspect of this island from the Shoals is very striking, so lonely
+it lies on the eastern horizon, its tall lighthouse like a slender
+column against the sky. It is easily mistaken for the smokestack of a
+steamer by unaccustomed eyes, and sometimes the watcher most familiar
+with its appearance can hardly distinguish it from the distant white
+sails that steal by it, to and fro. Sometimes it looms colossal in the
+mirage of summer; in winter it lies blurred and ghostly at the edge of
+chilly sea and pallid sky. In the sad, strange light of winter sunsets,
+its faithful star blazes suddenly from the darkening east, and sends a
+friendly ray across to its neighbor at the Shoals, waiting as it also
+waits, ice-bound, storm-swept, and solitary, for gentler days to come.
+And “winter’s rains and ruins” have an end at last.
+
+In the latter part of February, after ten days perhaps of the
+northwester, bringing across to the islands all the chill of the
+snow-covered hills of the continent, some happy evening it dies into
+a reasonable breeze, and, while the sun sets, you climb the snowy
+height, and sweep with your eyes the whole circle of the horizon, with
+nothing to impede the view. Ah! how sad it looks in the dying light!
+Star Island close by with its silent little village and the sails of
+belated fishing-boats hurrying in over the dark water to the moorings;
+White Island afar off “kindling its great red star”; on every side the
+long, bleached points of granite stretching out into the sea, so cold
+and bleak; the line of coast, sad purple; and the few schooners leaden
+and gray in the distance. Yet there is a hopeful glow where the sun
+went down, suggestive of the spring; and before the ruddy sweetness
+of the western sky the melancholy east is flushed with violet, and up
+into the delicious color rolls a gradual moon, mellow and golden as in
+harvest-time, while high above her the great star Jupiter begins to
+glitter clear. On such an evening some subtle influence of the coming
+spring steals to the heart, and eyes that have watched the winter skies
+so patiently grow wistful with the thought of summer days to come.
+On shore in these last weeks of winter one becomes aware, by various
+delicate tokens, of the beautiful change at hand,--by the deepening
+of the golden willow wands into a more living color, and by their
+silvery buds, which in favored spots burst the brown sheaths; by the
+reddening of bare maple-trees, as if with promise of future crimson
+flowers; by the sweet cry of the returning bluebird; by the alders at
+the river’s edge. If the season is mild, the catkins begin to unwind
+their tawny tresses in the first weeks of March. But here are no trees,
+and no bluebirds come till April. Perhaps some day the delightful
+clangor of the wild geese is heard, and looking upward, lo! the long,
+floating ribbon streaming northward across the sky. What joy they bring
+to hearts so weary with waiting! Truly a wondrous content is shaken
+down with their wild clamors out of the cloudy heights, and a courage
+and vigor lurk in these strong voices that touch the listener with
+something better than gladness, while he traces eagerly the wavering
+lines that seek the north with steady, measured flight.
+
+Gradually the bitter winds abate; early in March the first flocks of
+crows arrive, and they soar finely above the coves, and perch on the
+flukes of stranded anchors or the tops of kellock-sticks that lie
+about the water’s edge. They are most welcome, for they are never
+seen in winter; and pleasant it is to watch them beating their black,
+ragged pinions in the blue, while the gulls swim on beyond them
+serenely, shining still whiter for their sable color. No other birds
+come till about the 27th of March, and then all at once the islands
+are alive with song-sparrows, and these sing from morning till night
+so beautifully that dull and weary indeed must be the mortal who can
+resist the charm of their fresh music. There is a matchless sweetness
+and good cheer in this brave bird. The nightingale singing with its
+breast against a thorn may be divine; yet would I turn away from its
+tender melody to listen to the fresh, cheerful, healthy song of this
+dauntless and happy little creature. They come in flocks to be fed
+every morning the whole summer long, tame and charming, with their
+warm brown and gray feathers, striped and freaked with wood-color,
+and little brown knots at each pretty throat! They build their nests,
+and remain till the snow falls; frequently they remain all winter;
+sometimes they come into the house for shelter; once one fluttered in
+and entered the canaries’ cage voluntarily, and stayed there singing
+like a voice from heaven all winter. Robins and blackbirds appear with
+the sparrows; a few blackbirds build and remain; the robins, finding
+no trees, flit across to the mainland. Yellow-birds and kingbirds
+occasionally build here, but very rarely. By the first of April the
+snow is gone, and our bit of earth is free from that dead white mask.
+How lovely then the gentle neutral tints of tawny intervals of dead
+grass and brown bushes and varying stone appear, set in the living sea!
+There is hardly a square foot of the bare rock that isn’t precious for
+its soft coloring; and freshly beautiful are the uncovered lichens that
+with patient fingering have ornamented the rough surfaces with their
+wonderful embroideries. They flourish with the greatest vigor by the
+sea; whole houses at Star used to be covered with the orange-colored
+variety, and I have noticed the same thing in the pretty fishing
+village of Newcastle and on some of the old buildings by the river-side
+in sleepy Portsmouth city. Through April the weather softens daily,
+and by the 20th come gray, quiet days with mild northeast wind; in the
+hollows the grass has greened, and now the gentle color seems to brim
+over and spread out upon the ground in faint and fainter gradations.
+A refreshing odor springs from the moist earth, from the short, sweet
+turf which the cattle crop so gladly,--a musky fragrance unlike that
+of inland pastures; and with this is mingled the pure sea-breeze,--a
+most reviving combination. The turfy gorges, boulder-strewn and still,
+remind one of Alexander Smith’s descriptions of his summer in Skye, of
+those quiet, lonely glens,--just such a grassy carpet was spread in
+their hollows. By the 23d of April come the first swallow and flocks of
+martins, golden-winged and downy woodpeckers, the tiny, ruby-crowned
+wren, and troops of many other kinds of birds; kingfishers that perch
+on stranded kellocks, little nuthatches that peck among the shingles
+for hidden spiders, and gladden the morning with sweet, quaint cries,
+so busy and bright and friendly! All these tarry only awhile in their
+passage to the mainland.
+
+But though the birds come and the sky has relented and grown tender
+with its melting clouds, the weather in New England has a fashion of
+leaping back into midwinter in the space of an hour, and all at once
+comes half a hurricane from the northwest, charged with the breath of
+all the remaining snow-heaps on the far mountain ranges,--a “white-sea
+roarin’ wind” that takes you back to January. In the afternoon,
+through the cold, transparent heaven, a pale half-moon glides slowly
+over; there is a splendor of wild clouds at sunset, dusk heaps with
+scarlet fringes, scattered flecks of flame in a clear crimson air above
+the fallen sun; then cold moonlight over the black sea, with the flash
+and gleam of white waves the whole night long.
+
+But the potent spirit of the spring triumphs at last. When the sun in
+its journey north passes a certain group of lofty pine-trees standing
+out distinctly against the sky on Breakfast Hill in Greenland, New
+Hampshire, which lies midway in the coast line, then the Shoalers are
+happy in the conviction that there will be “settled weather”; and they
+put no trust in any relenting of the elements before that time. After
+this there soon come days when to be alive is quite enough joy,--days
+when it is bliss only to watch and feel how
+
+                       “God renews
+                        His ancient rapture,”--
+
+days when the sea lies, colored like a turquoise, blue and still, and
+from the south a band of warm, gray-purple haze steals down on the
+horizon like an encircling arm about the happy world. The lightest
+film encroaches upon the sea, only made perceptible by the shimmering
+of far-off sails. A kind of bloom, inexpressibly lovely, softens over
+the white canvas of nearer vessels, like a delicate veil. There is a
+fascination in the motion of these slender schooners, a wondrous grace,
+as they glide before a gentle wind, slowly bowing, bending, turning,
+with curving canvas just filled with the breeze, and shadows falling
+soft from sail to sail. They are all so picturesque, so suggestive,
+from the small, tanned spritsail some young islander spreads to flit
+to and fro among the rocks and ledges, to the stately column of canvas
+that bears the great ship round the world. The variety of their
+aspects is endless and ever beautiful, whether you watch them from the
+lighthouse-top, dreaming afar on the horizon, or at the water’s edge;
+whether they are drowned in the flood of sunshine on the waves, or
+glide darkly through the track of the moonlight, or fly toward you full
+of promise, wing and wing, like some magnificent bird, or steal away
+reddening in the sunset as if to
+
+               “Sink with all you love below the verge.”
+
+I know nothing sadder than their aspect in the light of the winter
+sunsets, as they vanish in the cold east, blushing for a fleeting
+moment, sweetly, faintly, under the last touch of the dropping day.
+To a child’s imagination they are all full of charm and of mystery,
+freighted with heavenly dreams. “The thoughts of youth are long, long
+thoughts,” and the watching of the sails filled the lonely, lovely
+summer days of one young Shoaler with joy enough and to spare. How
+many pictures linger in my mind,--splendid, stately apparitions of
+full-rigged, slender schooners, passing very near early in the breezy
+mornings of spring, every inch of canvas in a blaze of white light,
+and the whole vessel alive from keel to topmast. And well I remember
+on soft May evenings how they came dropping down from Cape Ann, while
+the sunset, streaming through low bars of cloud, just touched them with
+pale gold, and made them half luminous and altogether lovely; and how
+the fog clung in silver strips to the dark, wet sails of vessels lying
+becalmed when all the air about was clear and free from mist; how the
+mackerel fleet surrounded the islands, five hundred craft sometimes
+between the islands and the coast, so that one might almost walk on
+shore from deck to deck. It was wonderful to wake on some midsummer
+morning and find the sea gray-green, like translucent chrysoprase, and
+the somewhat stormy sunrise painting the sails bright flame-color as
+they flew before the warm, wild wind that blew strongly from the south.
+At night, sometimes, in a glory of moonlight, a vessel passed close
+in with all sail set, and only just air enough to fill the canvas,
+enough murmur from the full tide to drown the sound of her movement,--a
+beautiful ghost stealing softly by, and passing in mysterious light
+beyond the glimmering headland out of sight. Here was suggestion enough
+for a night full of visions! Then the scudding of sails before a
+storm,--how they came rushing in from the far, dim sea-line, racing by
+to Portsmouth Harbor, close-reefed, or under darkened mainsail and jib
+only, leaping over the long swell, and plunging their sharp bowsprits
+into a cloud of snowy spray at every leap! Then when the storm had
+spent itself, how beautiful to see them stealing tranquilly forth
+from the river’s mouth, flocking seaward again, shining white in the
+peaceful morning sunshine! Watching them in all their endless variety,
+coming and going, dreaming, drifting, or flying, many a time these
+quaint old rhymes occurred to me:--
+
+    “Ships, ships, I will descrie you
+      Amidst the main,
+    I will come and try you
+    What you are protecting,
+    And projecting,
+      What’s your end and aim?
+    Some go abroad for merchandise and trading,
+    Another stays to keep his country from invading,
+    A third is coming home with rich and wealthy lading.
+      Halloo! my fancie, whither wilt thou go?”
+
+As the winter is doubly hard, so are the gentler seasons doubly sweet
+and delightful, when one is shut out with them, as it were, and forced
+to observe all their changes and peculiarities, with so few human
+interests to interrupt one’s intercourse with nature. The rainy days
+in May at the Isles of Shoals have seemed to me more lovely than the
+sunshine in Paradise could be, so charming it was to walk in the warm
+showers over our island, and note all the mosses and lichens drenched
+and bright with the moisture, thick, sweet buds on the bayberry bushes,
+rich green leaves unfolding here and there among the tangled vines,
+and bright anemones growing up between. The lovely eyebright glimmers
+everywhere. The rain, if it continues for several days, bleaches the
+sea-weed about the shores to a lighter and more golden brown, the sea
+is gray, and the sky lowers; but all these neutral tints are gentle
+and refreshing. The coasters rock lazily on the long swell toward Cape
+Ann, dim through low-hanging clouds; clearly the sandpipers call, and
+always the song-sparrows freshly surprise you with their outburst
+of cheerful music. In the last weeks of May comes a period of balmy
+days, with a gentle, incessant southwest wind, the sea a wonderful
+gray-blue, with the faint, impalpable haze lying over sails, islands,
+sea, and coast. A brooding warmth is everywhere. The sky is cloudless,
+but opaque,--a kind of milky effect in the atmosphere, through which
+the sun is seen as through smoked glass, and long before it sets one
+can bear to look at the crimson ball slow sinking in the rich, red
+west; and the moon is like copper, throwing no light on the water. The
+islanders call this a “smoky sou’wester.” Now come delicious twilights,
+with silence broken only by mysterious murmurs from the waves, and
+sweet, full cries from the sandpipers fluttering about their nests
+on the margin of the beaches,--tender, happy notes that thrill the
+balmy air, and echo softly about the silent, moonlit coves. Sails in
+this twilight atmosphere gather the dusk within their folds; if the
+warm wind is blowing softly, there is enchantment in the sound of the
+lazily-flapping canvas and in the long creak of the mast. A human voice
+borne through this breathing wind comes like a waft of music faintly
+heard across the water. The mornings now are exquisite, the delicate
+flush of the sunrise through this beautiful haze is indescribable. The
+island is indeed like
+
+               “A precious stone set in the silver sea,”
+
+so freshly green, so flower-strewn and fragrant, so musical with
+birds, and with the continual caressing of summer waves. Now and then
+a bobolink pays us a flying visit, and, tilting on a blackberry spray,
+pours out his intoxicating song; some morning is heard the fairy
+bugling of an oriole; a scarlet tanager honors the place with half a
+day’s sojourn, to be the wonder of all eyes; but commonly the swallows
+hold it in undisputed possession. The air is woven through and through
+with the gleam of their burnished wings and their clear, happy cries.
+They are so tame, knowing how well they are beloved, that they gather
+on the window-sills, twittering and fluttering, gay and graceful,
+turning their heads this way and that, eying you askance without a
+trace of fear. All day they build their nests about the eaves, nor heed
+how loving eyes do watch their charming toil. Walking abroad in these
+pleasant evenings, many a little sparrow’s nest one finds low down in
+the bayberry-bushes,--smooth, brown cups of woven grass, wherein lie
+the five speckled eggs, each full of silent music, each dumb miracle
+waiting for the finger of God to wake, to be alive, to drink the
+sunshine and the breeze, to fill the air with blissful sound. At the
+water’s edge one finds the long ledges covered with barnacles, and from
+each rough shell a tiny, brown, filmy hand is thrust out, opening and
+shutting in gladness beneath the coming tide, feeling the freshness
+of the flowing water. The shore teems with life in manifold forms. As
+the darkness gathers, the ripples begin to break in pale flame against
+the rocks; if the tide is low enough, it is charming to steal down in
+the shadow, and, drawing aside the curtain of coarse sea-weed that
+drapes the face of some smooth rock, to write on the surface beneath:
+the strange fire follows your finger; and there is your name in weird
+flame, all alive, quivering and trembling, and finally fading and
+disappearing. In a still pool you drop a stone or touch the water
+with your hand: instantly a thousand stars break out and burn and
+vanish in a moment! It used to be a pleasant thing to bring a piece of
+drift-wood, water-soaked, and shaggy with fine seaweed, up from the
+shore, and from some dark corner suddenly sweep my hand across it: a
+sheet of white flame followed, startling the beholder.
+
+June is of course the most delightful month here, everything is yet
+so fresh; later the hot sun dries and scorches the thin soil, and
+partially destroys the little vegetation which finds room upon the
+island. But through this month the ground is beautiful with starry,
+purple stonewort; like little suns the blossoms of the lion’s-foot
+shine in the thinnest of the soil; herb-robert blossoms; the slender
+arenaria steals up among the bushes, lifting a little white flower
+to the sun; here and there the sorrel lies in crimson stains; in wet
+places sturdy clumps of fern unroll their golden green with splendid
+vigor of growth; sundew and partridge-berry creep at their feet;
+and from the swamp the rushes rise in ranks, like a faint, green
+vapor, slowly, day by day. The few wild-cherry bushes have each its
+inevitable caterpillars’ nest; one can but wonder how caterpillars and
+canker-worms find their way across the water. The presence of green
+snakes on these rocks may be explained by their having been found
+coiled on a piece of drift-wood many miles out at sea. Bees find their
+way out from the land in companies, seeking the white clover-blossoms
+that rise in cool, creamy, fragrant globes through the dark leaves
+and grass. The clover here is peculiarly rich. Many varieties of
+butterflies abound, the handsome moth of the American silkworm among
+them. One night in June, at sunset, we were kindling the lamps in the
+lighthouse, and because it was so mild and still outside, the little
+iron door of the lantern was left open. No breeze came in to stir
+the flame that quivered in the centre of each shining reflector, but
+presently glided through the door the pale-green, exquisite Luna moth,
+with its wonderful crescents, its lines of velvet brown, and long under
+wings drawn out like the tail of a swallow. It sailed slowly round and
+round the dome above the lamps at first, but soon became agitated, and
+would have dashed itself against the flames but that I caught it. What
+a marvel it was! I never dreamed of the existence of so beautiful a
+creature. Titania herself could not have been more interesting to me.
+
+In the quiet little coves troops of butterflies are often seen,
+anchored for the night, clinging to the thistle-blossoms to be safe
+from assailing winds. Crickets are never heard here till after the 1st
+of August. On the mainland they begin, about the 28th of May, a sad
+and gentle autumnal undertone, which from that time accompanies the
+jubilant chorus of summer in a gradual _crescendo_, till finally the
+days pass on to no other music save their sweet, melancholy chirrup.
+In August comes the ruby-throated humming-bird, and several pairs
+flutter about the little gardens for weeks. By the 1st of July the wild
+roses blossom, and every bit of swampy ground is alive with the waving
+flags of the iris, each flower of which is full of exquisite variety
+of tint and shade of gold and violet. All over the island patches of
+it diversify the surface, set like amethysts in the rich greens and
+browns of turf and mossy spaces. Through the tangle of leaves and
+grasses the spikes of golden-rod make their way upward slowly day by
+day, to be ready at the first beckoning of Autumn’s finger to light
+their torches and join the fair procession; the green hollows are
+filled with blossoming elder, white as a lake of milk; the pimpernel is
+awake; and the heavy, stout stalks of the mulleins uprear their woolly
+buds, that soon will break into squares of pallid gold. The world is at
+high tide of delight. Along the coast-line the mirage races in flowing
+undulations of heat, changing the hill ranges into a solid wall, to
+dissolve them, and again reunite them into clusters of gigantic towers
+and battlements; trees, spires, chimneys, lighthouses become roofs and
+minarets and domes of some stately city of the clouds, and these melt
+in their turn, and the whole coast shrinks away to the merest line
+on the horizon immeasurably removed. Each of these changes, and the
+various aspects of their little world, are of inestimable value to the
+lonely children living always in that solitude. Nothing is too slight
+to be precious: the flashing of an oar-blade in the morning light;
+the twinkling of a gull’s wings afar off, like a star in the yellow
+sunshine of the drowsy summer afternoon; the water-spout waltzing
+away before the wild wind that cleaves the sea from the advancing
+thunder-cloud; the distant showers that march about the horizon,
+trailing their dusky fringes of falling rain over sea and land; every
+phase of the great thunder-storms that make glorious the weeks of
+July and August, from the first floating film of cloud that rises in
+the sky till the scattered fragments of the storm stream eastward to
+form a background for the rainbow,--all these things are of the utmost
+importance to dwellers at the Isles of Shoals. There is something
+especially delightful in the perfumes which stream across the sea after
+showers, like a heavenly greeting from the land: scents of hay and of
+clover, spice of pine woods, balm of flowers come floating over the
+cool waves on the wings of the west wind, and touch one like a breath
+from Paradise. Few sounds from the shore reach the islands; the booming
+of guns is audible, and sometimes, when the wind is west, the air is
+pierced with distant car-whistles, so very remote, however, that they
+are hardly to be recognized except by a practised ear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a superstition among the islanders that Philip Babb, or
+some evil-minded descendant of his, still haunts Appledore; and no
+consideration would induce the more timid to walk alone after dark
+over a certain shingly beach on that island, at the top of a cove
+bearing Babb’s name,--for there the uneasy spirit is oftenest seen. He
+is supposed to have been so desperately wicked when alive that there is
+no rest for him in his grave. His dress is a coarse, striped butcher’s
+frock, with a leather belt, to which is attached a sheath containing
+a ghostly knife, sharp and glittering, which it is his delight to
+brandish in the face of terrified humanity. One of the Shoalers is
+perfectly certain that he and Babb have met, and he shudders with real
+horror, recalling the meeting. This is his story. It was after sunset
+(of course), and he was coming round the corner of a work-shop, when
+he saw a wild and dreadful figure advancing toward him; his first
+thought was that some one wished to make him the victim of a practical
+joke, and he called out something to the effect that he “wasn’t
+afraid”; but the thing came near with ghastly face and hollow eyes,
+and, assuming a fiendish expression, took out the knife from its belt
+and flourished it in the face of the Shoaler, who fled to the house
+and entered breathless, calling for the person who he supposed had
+tried to frighten him. That person was quietly eating his supper; and
+when the poor fellow saw him he was so much agitated that he nearly
+fainted, and his belief in Babb was fixed more firmly than ever. One
+spring night some one was sitting on the broad piazza at sunset; it
+was calm and mild; the sea murmured a little; birds twittered softly;
+there was hardly a waft of wind in the still atmosphere. Glancing
+toward Babb’s Cove, he saw a figure slowly crossing the shingle to
+the path which led to the house. After watching it a moment he called
+to it, but there was no reply; again he called, still no answer; but
+the dark figure came slowly on; and then he reflected that he had
+heard no step on the loose shingle that was wont to give back every
+footfall, and, somewhat puzzled, he slowly descended the steps of the
+piazza and went to meet it. It was not so dark but that he could see
+the face and recognize the butcher’s frock and leather belt of Babb,
+but he was not prepared for the devilish expression of malice in that
+hollow face, and, spite of his prosaic turn of mind, he was chilled to
+the marrow at the sight. The white stripes in the frock gleamed like
+phosphorescent light, so did the awful eyes. Again he called aloud,
+“Who are you? What do you want?” and still advanced, when suddenly the
+shape grew indistinct, first thick and cloudy, then thin, dissolving
+quite away, and, much amazed, he turned and went back to the house,
+perplexed and thoroughly dissatisfied. These tales I tell as they were
+told to me. I never saw Babb, nor ever could, I think. The whole Babb
+family are buried in the valley of Appledore where the houses stand,
+and till this year a bowling-alley stood upon the spot, and all the
+balls rolled over the bones of all the Babbs; that may have been one
+reason why the head of the family was so restless; since the last
+equinoctial gale blew the building down, perhaps he may rest more
+peacefully. Babb’s is, I believe, the only real ghost that haunts the
+islands; though in the loft at the parsonage on Star (a mere creep-hole
+under the eaves, unattainable by any steps or ladder) there is, in
+windy weather, the most extraordinary combination of sounds, as if
+two bluff old fellows were swearing at each other, gruffly, harshly,
+continually, with a perseverance worthy of a better cause. Really, it
+is a most disagreeable racket! A lean, brown, hollow-eyed old woman
+from Star used to tell how her daughter-in-law died, in a way that took
+the color out of childish cheeks to hear; for the dying woman thought
+the ghosts were scratching for her outside, against the house. “‘Ma’y
+Hahner’” (Mary Hannah), “she said to me, a whisperin’, says she, ‘Who’s
+that scratching, tearing the house down underneath the window?’ ‘No,
+it ain’t nothin’,’ says I; ‘Ma’y Hahner, there ain’t nobody a tearin’
+the house down underneath the winder.’ ‘Yes, yes, there is,’ says she,
+‘there is! I hear ’em scratching, scratching, tearing the house down
+underneath the winder!’ And then I know’d Ma’y Hahner was goin’ to die,
+and so she did afore mornin’.”
+
+There is a superstition here and along the coast to this effect. A
+man gathering drift-wood or whatever it may be, sees a spade stuck
+in the ground as if inviting him to dig. He isn’t quite ready, goes
+and empties his basket first, then comes back to investigate, and lo!
+there’s nothing there, and he is tormented the rest of his life with
+the thought that probably untold wealth lay beneath that spade, which
+he might have possessed had he only been wise enough to seize the
+treasure when it offered itself. A certain man named William Mace,
+living at Star, long, long ago, swore that he had had this experience;
+and there’s a dim tradition that another person, seeing the spade,
+passed by about his business, but hastening back, arrived just in time
+to see the last of the sinking tool, and to perceive also a golden
+flat-iron disappearing into the earth. This he seized, but no human
+power could extricate it from the ground, and he was forced to let go
+his hold and see it sink out of his longing ken.
+
+Some young people, camping on the south side of Appledore, one summer,
+among the ancient graves, dug up a skeleton; the bones crumbled to
+dust, but the skull remained intact, and I kept it for a long time.
+The Shoalers shook their heads. “Hog Island would have no ‘luck’ while
+that skull remained above ground.” It had lain so long in the earth
+that it was no more repulsive than a bit of stone, yet a nameless dread
+invested it. At last I took it in my hands and pored over it till the
+shudder passed away forever, and then I was never weary of studying
+it. Sitting by the driftwood blaze late into the still autumn nights
+alone at my desk, it kept me company,--a vase of brilliant flowers on
+one side, the skull on the other, and the shaded lamp between, equally
+lighting both. A curious head it was, thick as an Ethiop’s, with no
+space above the eyes, high above the ears, and heavy behind them. But
+O, those hollows where the eyes once looked out, beholding the same sea
+and sky we see to-day! Those great, melancholy, empty hollows,--what
+sort of creature gazed from them? Cunning and malice, anger and hate,
+may have burned within them in sullen flame; who shall say if any
+beauty ever illumined them? If hate smouldered here, did love ever look
+out and transfigure the poor, dull face? did any spark from the far
+heaven even brighten it? any touch of lofty thought or aspiration turn
+the clay to fire? And when, so many years ago, this being glided away
+from behind these awful windows and left them empty for ever and ever,
+did he find what in his life here he could not have possessed, with
+this head, which he did not make, and therefore was not responsible
+for? Many and many a question I put silently to the silent casket which
+had held a human soul; there was no sound to answer me save only the
+great, gentle whisper of the sea without the windows, and now and then
+a sigh from the autumn wind. There came to me a sense of the pathos of
+the infinite patience of humanity, waiting so helplessly and blindly
+for the unravelling of the riddle that has troubled every thoughtful
+soul since the beginning of time. Little roots of plants were clasped
+about the temples. Behind the right ear were three indentations, as if
+made by some sharp instrument, suggesting foul play. An Indian tomahawk
+might have made those marks, or a pirate’s cutlass: who can say? What
+matter is it now? I kept the relic for months, till it crumbled so fast
+when I daily dusted it that I feared it would disappear entirely; so I
+carried it quietly back and laid it in the grave from which it had been
+taken, wondering, as I drew the shallow earth over it, who had stood
+round about when it was buried for the first time, centuries ago; what
+manner of people, and were they afraid or sorry. But there was no voice
+to answer me.
+
+I have before me a weird, romantic legend of these islands, in a
+time-stained, battered newspaper of forty years ago. I regret that it
+is too long to be given entire, for the unknown writer tells his story
+well. He came to the Shoals for the benefit of his failing health, and
+remained there late into the autumn of 1826, “in the family of a worthy
+fisherman.” He dilates upon the pleasure he found in the loneliness
+of the place, “the vast solitude of the sea; no one who has not known
+it can imbibe the faintest idea of it.” “From the hour I learned
+the truth,” he says, “that all which lives must die, the thought of
+dissolution has haunted me;--the falling of a leaf, a gray hair, or a
+faded cheek, has power to chill me. But here in the recesses of these
+eternal rocks, with only a cloudless sky above and an ocean before me,
+for the first time in my life have I shaken off the fear of death and
+believed myself immortal.”
+
+He tells his strange story in this way: “It was one of those awfully
+still mornings which cloud-gazeers will remember as characterizing
+the autumn months. There was not a single vapor-wreath to dim the
+intense blue of the sky, or a breath to ruffle the almost motionless
+repose of the great deep; even the sunlight fell seemingly with
+stiller brightness on the surface of it.” He stood on a low, long
+point fronting the east, with the cliffs behind him, gazing out upon
+the calm, when suddenly he became aware of a figure standing near him.
+It was a woman wrapped closely in a dark sea-cloak, with a profusion
+of light hair flowing loosely over her shoulders. Fair as a lily and
+as still, she stood with her eyes fixed on the far distance, without
+a motion, without a sound. “Thinking her one of the inhabitants of a
+neighboring island who was watching for the return of a fishing-boat,
+or perhaps a lover, I did not immediately address her; but seeing
+no appearance of any vessel, at length accosted her with, ‘Well, my
+pretty maiden, do you see anything of him?’ She turned instantly, and
+fixing on me the largest and most melancholy blue eyes I ever beheld,
+said quietly, ‘He _will_ come again.’” Then she disappeared round a
+jutting rock and left him marvelling, and though he had come to the
+island (which was evidently Appledore) for a forenoon’s stroll, he was
+desirous to get back again to Star and his own quarters after this
+interruption. Fairly at home again, he was inclined to look upon his
+adventure as a dream, a mere delusion arising from his illness, but
+concluded to seek in his surroundings something to substantiate, or
+remove the idea. Finding nothing,--no woman on the island resembling
+the one he had met,--and “hearing of no circumstance which might
+corroborate the unaccountable impression,” he resolved to go again to
+the same spot. This time it blew half a gale; the fishermen in vain
+endeavored to dissuade him. He was so intensely anxious to be assured
+of the truth or fiction of the impression of the day before, that he
+could not refrain, and launched his boat, “which sprang strongly upon
+the whitened waters,” and, unfurling his one sail, he rounded a point
+and was soon safely sheltered in a small cove on the leeward side of
+the island, probably Babb’s Cove.
+
+Then he leaped the chasms and made his way to the scene of his
+bewilderment. The sea was rolling over the low point; the spot where
+he had stood the day before, “was a chaos of tumult, yet even then I
+could have sworn that I heard with the same deep distinctness, the
+quiet words of the maiden, ‘He _will_ come again,’ and then a low,
+remotely-ringing laughter. All the latent superstition of my nature
+rose up over me, overwhelming as the waves upon the rocks.” After that,
+day after day, when the weather would permit, he visited the desolate
+place, to find the golden-haired ghost, and often she stood beside him,
+“silent as when I first saw her, except to say, as then, ‘He _will_
+come again,’ and these words came upon the mind rather than upon the
+ear. I was conscious of them rather then heard them,--it was all like a
+dream, a mysterious intuition. I observed that the shells never crashed
+beneath her footsteps, nor did her garments rustle. In the bright,
+awful calm of noon and in the rush of the storm there was the same
+heavy stillness over her. When the winds were so furious that I could
+scarcely stand in their sweep, the light hair lay upon the forehead
+of the maiden without lifting a fibre. Her great blue eyeballs never
+moved in their sockets, and always shone with the same fixed, unearthly
+gleam. The motion of her person was imperceptible; I knew that she was
+here, and that she was gone.”
+
+[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE SOUTHEASTERN POINT OF APPLEDORE.]
+
+So sweet a ghost was hardly a salutary influence in the life of our
+invalid. She “held him with her glittering eye” till he grew quite
+beside himself. This is so good a description I cannot choose but quote
+it: “The last time I stood with her, was just at the evening of a
+tranquil day. It was a lovely sunset. A few gold-edged clouds crowned
+the hills of the distant continent, and the sun had gone down behind
+them. The ocean lay blushing beneath the blushes of the sky, and even
+the ancient rocks seemed smiling in the glance of the departing day.
+Peace, deep peace was the pervading power. The waters, lapsing among
+the caverns, spoke of it, and it was visible in the silent motion of
+the small boats, which, loosening their white sails in the cove of
+Star Island, passed slowly out, one by one, to the night-fishing.” In
+the glow of sunset he fancied the ghost grew rosy and human. In the
+mellow light her cold eyes seemed to soften. But he became suddenly so
+overpowered with terror that “kneeling in shuddering fearfulness, he
+swore never more to look upon that spot, and never did again.”
+
+Going back to Star he met his old fisherman, who without noticing his
+agitation, told him quietly that he knew where he had been and what
+he had seen; that he himself had seen her, and proceeded to furnish
+him with the following facts. At the time of the first settlement,
+the islands were infested by pirates,--the bold Captain Teach, called
+Blackbeard, being one of the most notorious. One of Teach’s comrades,
+a Captain Scot, brought this lovely lady hither. They buried immense
+treasure on the islands; that of Scot was buried on an island apart
+from the rest. Before they departed on a voyage, “to plunder, slash,
+and slay,” (in which, by the way, they were involved in one awful doom
+by the blowing up of a powder magazine), the maiden was carried to the
+island where her pirate lover’s treasure was hidden, and made to swear
+with horrible rites that until his return, if it were not till the day
+of judgment, she would guard it from the search of all mortals. So
+there she paces still, according to our story-teller. Would I had met
+this lily-fair ghost! Is it she, I wonder, who laments like a Banshee
+before the tempests, wailing through the gorges at Appledore, “He will
+_not_ come again”? Perhaps it was she who frightened a merry party of
+people at Duck Island, whither they had betaken themselves for a day’s
+pleasure a few summers ago. In the centre of the low island stood a
+deserted shanty which some strange fishermen had built there several
+years before, and left empty, tenanted only by the mournful winds. It
+was blown down the September following. It was a rude hut with two
+rough rooms and one square window, or rather opening for a window, for
+sash or glass there was none. One of our party proposed going to look
+after the boats, as the breeze freshened and blew directly upon the
+cove where we had landed. We were gathered on the eastern end of the
+island when he returned, and, kneeling on the withered grass where we
+were grouped, he said suddenly, “Do you know what I have seen? Coming
+back from the boats, I faced the fish-house, and as I neared it I saw
+some one watching me from the window. Of course I thought it was one
+of you, but when I was near enough to have recognized it, I perceived
+it to be the strange countenance of a woman, wan as death; a face
+young, yet with a look in it of infinite age. Old! it was older than
+the Sphinx in the desert! It looked as if it had been watching and
+waiting for me since the beginning of time. I walked straight into the
+hut. There wasn’t a vestige of a human being there; it was absolutely
+empty.” All the warmth and brightness of the summer day could hardly
+prevent a chill from creeping into our veins as we listened to this
+calmly delivered statement, and we actually sent a boat back to
+Appledore for a large yacht to take us home, for the wind rose fast and
+“gurly grew the sea,” and we half expected the wan woman would come and
+carry our companion off bodily before our eyes.
+
+Since writing these imperfect sketches of the Shoals it has become
+an historical fact for the records of the State of New Hampshire that
+the town of Gosport has disappeared, is obliterated from the face of
+the earth, nearly all the inhabitants having been bought out, that the
+place might be converted into a summer resort. Upon Appledore a large
+house of entertainment has been extending its capabilities for many
+years, and the future of the Shoals as a famous watering-place may be
+considered certain.
+
+The slight sprinkling of inhabitants yet remaining on Smutty-nose and
+elsewhere, who seem inclined to make of the place a permanent home, are
+principally Swedes and Norwegians; and a fine, self-respecting race
+they are, so thrifty, cleanly, well-mannered, and generally excellent
+that one can hardly say enough in their praise. It is to be hoped that
+a little rill from the tide of emigration which yearly sets from those
+countries toward America may finally people the unoccupied portions of
+the Shoals with a colony that will be a credit to New England.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                          =Transcriber’s Notes=
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
+
+  Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been maintained
+  as printed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77366 ***