Tales of the Chesapeake | Page 5

she resisted, like a white woman. That she should
have ruined this preacher!"
"He was a poet," said a third. "'Peared like as if he believed every thing
he preached. But, my sakes! we can't have sich things in our church."
"She loved him, too, the hussy!" exclaimed a fourth. "She would have
been his slave if he had asked her. Oh! what misery she felt when she
knew that his passion for her was starving him, body and soul!"

They slipped away, with a feeling that, somehow, two very guilty
people had been punished in those two. The negroes made the funeral
procession. The Jew walked amongst the negroes.
"O Father Abraham," he said, chuckling to himself, "forgive me that I
stand here, no renegade to my faith, yet the only white Christian on
Chincoteague!"
Issachar was oyster-man, sailor, and sutler in one. He advanced money
to build pungy boats, knit nets, and make huts. He kept a trading place,
packed fish, and dealt with the Eastern port cities by a schooner whose
crew he shipped himself and sometimes commanded her. He was a
wrecker, too, prompt and enterprising; passed middle life, but full of
vitality; bold and cunning in equal degree; and he had been, it was
guessed, a slaver, and some said a pirate. He was called by the negroes
the King of Chincoteague. His schooner was named The Eli.
Chincoteague is the principal inhabited island along the one hundred
miles of coast between the capes of the Delaware and of the
Chesapeake--a coast of low bars, divided into long and slender islands
by a dozen inlets, which, almost filled with sand, permit only
light-draught vessels to enter; and it is destruction to any ship to go
ashore on that coast, where five successive lighthouses warn the
commerce of the Atlantic off, but are unable to intimidate the storms
which sweep the low shores and almost threaten to leap over the
peninsula and submerge it. Chincoteague lies like a tongue between
two inlets, and partly protrudes into the sea, but is also sheltered in part
by the bar of Assateague, whose light has flamed for years.
Chincoteague is about ten miles long, and behind it an inland bay
stretches continuously, under various names, for thirty miles, protected
from the ocean, and scarcely flavored with its salt, except near the
outlet at Chincoteague, where the oysters lie in the brackish sluices,
and all sorts of fish, from shrimps to sharks, hover around the oyster
beds. In the green depths they can be seen, and there the crab darts
sidewise, like a shooting star. In the sandy beach grows the mamano, or
snail-clam, putting his head from his shell at high tide to suck nutrition
from the mysterious food of the sea, and giving back such chowder to

man as makes the eater feel his stomach to possess a nobility above the
pleasures of the brain. The bay of Chincoteague is five or six miles
wide, and the nearest hamlet is in Virginia, as is Chincoteague island
also. The hamlet takes the name of Horntown, and not far from there is
the old court-house seat of Snow Hill, in Maryland. Every soul on
Chincoteague was native there or thereabout, except Issachar the Jew.
He had appeared amongst them after a sudden storm, the solitary
survivor of a wreck that had partly drifted ashore, and, as he said, gone
down with all his fortune. The mild air and easy livelihood of the spot
pleased the Jew, after his first despair, and he set about making another
fortune. Capable, solitary and active, he soon outstripped all the people
of the islands, and neither beloved nor unbeloved, lived grimly, as
chance ordained, and until now, had never shown more than business
benevolence. It was a surprising thing to the people of Chincoteague,
when the news went round that he had been over to court at
Drummond-town and given his recognizance to bring up the orphan
boy--whom he named Abraham Purnell--so that the county should not
be at the expense of him, and he also brought out from New York, on
the Eli's next trip, a Hebrew woman to be the boy's matron. Suckled at
a negro's breast, Abraham grew to a vigorous youth, resembling his
guardian's race and his mother's as well, in the curling nature of his hair
and the brightness of his eyes. The Old Testament Scriptures alone
were taught him, and Issachar himself joined the family circle at daily
prayer to encourage the faith of Israel in the stranger. The finest of the
lean, tough ponies, bred only on Chincoteague, and renowned
throughout the peninsula for their endurance, was bought for the boy,
as he grew older. He was made Issachar's companion, and, in course of
time, passed in fireside talk