There is another subject for a picture for you, my friend Claude:
but your gayer fancy will prefer the scene just as you are sketching
it now, as still and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay
darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across
the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats
fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy
even from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howling
waste of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside the town
covered with shrieking women and old men casting themselves on the
pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept
up at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a single
dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who
had gone out the night before in the fulness of strength and courage.
Hardly an old playmate of mine, but is drowned and gone
'Their graves are scattered far and wide
By mount, by stream, and sea.'
One poor little fellow's face starts out of the depths of memory as
fresh as ever, my especial pet and bird-nesting companion as a boy--a
little delicate, precocious, large-brained child, who might have
written books some day, if he had been a gentleman's son: but when
his father's ship was wrecked, they found him, left alone of all the
crew, just as he had been lashed into the rigging by loving and dying
hands, but cold and stiff, the little soul beaten out of him by the
cruel waves before it had time to show what growth there might have
been in it.
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