Culm Rock

Culm Rock, by Glance Gaylord

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Title: Culm Rock The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught
Author: Glance Gaylord
Release Date: February 6, 2007 [EBook #20524]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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CULM ROCK,
The Story of a Year:
WHAT IT BROUGHT AND WHAT IT TAUGHT.
BY GLANCE GAYLORD.

BOSTON:
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by HENRY HOYT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.
INNES AND NILES, Stereotypers and Printers, 37 Cornhill, Boston.

CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I.--The Old Stone House 5
II.--Letters 21
III.--On the "White Gull" 37
IV.--Disappointments 53
V.--The First Evening 71
VI.--Culm Sights 89
VII.--How the Month was spent 107
VIII.--Noll's Decision 124
IX.--Dirk's Trouble 142
X.--In the Sea 159
XI.--Dirk's Treasure 177
XII.--Firelight Talk 195
XIII.--The Winter's Waning 219
XIV.--Ned Thorn 236
XV.--Plans 254
XVI.--The Work Begun 272
XVII.--The Work Progressing 288
XVIII.--The Work Finished 304
XIX.--A Happy Walk 320
XX.--New Thoughts and New Plans 336
XXI.--In Peril of the Sea 353
XXII.--Weary Watching 367
XXIII.--Waiting 384
XXIV.--Days of Calm 400
XXV.--Out of the Sea 416
[Transcriber's Note: In this e-text, italics have been denoted by enclosing the affected text in underscores]

CULM ROCK.
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD STONE HOUSE.
Culm Rock was a wild place. You might search the coast for miles and not find another bit of nature so bare and rent and ragged as this. So fiercely had the storms driven over it, so wildly had the wind and waves beat, that the few cedars which once flourished as its only bit of greenness were long ago dead, and now held up only bleached and ragged hands. Jutting out into the sea, the surf rolled and thundered along its jagged shore of rock and sand, and was never silent. It would have been an island but for the narrow strips of sand, heaped high and ridgelike, which bound it to the main land; and this slender bridge, it often seemed, would be torn away by the ravenous sea which gnawed and engulfed great tracts at once, and yet heaped it higher and broader in the next storm. Beyond, on the firm and unyielding land, the pine woods stood up, vast, dim, and silent, stretching away into the interior. So, with the great dark barrier of forest behind and the waste of shining sea in front, Culm Rock seemed shut out from all the rest of the world. True, sails flitted along the horizon, and the smoke of foreign-bound steamers trailed against the sky, giving token of the great world's life and stir; and there were Skipper Ben and the "White Gull" who touched at the little wharf at Culm every week; but for these, the people--for there were people who dwelt here--might have lived in another sphere for aught they knew or were conscious of what was transpiring in the wonderful land which lay beyond the stretch of sea, and between which and themselves the "White Gull" was the only means of communication.
Do you wonder that people could spend their lives here, die, and never have seen the world without? There were only a dozen houses,--poor, racked, weather-beaten things, nestled on a bit of sand on a far corner of Culm,--inhabited by fishermen and their families. They were rough, hardy folk, but ignorant, and with only ambition enough to get their living out of the great sea, and a poor and scanty enough living at that. Skipper Ben brought them molasses and calicoes down in the "White Gull," and took their fish in exchange; and if he told them a bit of news from the great city and the greater world, it was all very well. If he failed to do this, it was all very well too.
Back of the fisher huts, the rocks rose high and dark, and quite hid the pine woods and the isthmus of yellow sand, and everything that could make Culm at all cheery or pleasant. This eminence was Wind Cliff, and served as a landmark for all the sailors whose path lay along the coast. Around this the gulls were alway flitting and screaming, and their nests were everywhere in the crevices of the rocks. Bald and gray it rose, scarred and rent with storms and age, and so steep as to be almost inaccessible. It fronted the north-west, and from its sharp tip the rock sloped south to the sea, and held in one of its great hollows down by the shore a house--such a house as you would not have looked for at Culm--with walls of stone and