The Tent on the Beach | Page 3

green buds of waves burst into white froth
flowers.
And when along the line of shore
The mists crept upward chill and
damp,
Stretched, careless, on their sandy floor
Beneath the flaring
lantern lamp,
They talked of all things old and new,
Read, slept,
and dreamed as idlers do;
And in the unquestioned freedom of the
tent,
Body and o'er-taxed mind to healthful ease unbent.
Once, when the sunset splendors died,
And, trampling up the sloping
sand,
In lines outreaching far and wide,
The white-waned billows
swept to land,
Dim seen across the gathering shade,
A vast and
ghostly cavalcade,
They sat around their lighted kerosene,
Hearing
the deep bass roar their every pause between.
Then, urged thereto, the Editor
Within his full portfolio dipped,

Feigning excuse while seaching for
(With secret pride) his
manuscript.
His pale face flushed from eye to beard,
With nervous
cough his throat he cleared,
And, in a voice so tremulous it betrayed

The anxious fondness of an author's heart, he read:

. . . . .
THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH
The Goody Cole who figures in this poem and The Changeling as
Eunice Cole, who for a quarter of a century or more was feared,
persecuted, and hated as the witch of Hampton. She lived alone in a
hovel a little distant from the spot where the Hampton Academy now
stands, and there she died, unattended. When her death was discovered,
she was hastily covered up in the earth near by, and a stake driven
through her body, to exorcise the evil spirit. Rev. Stephen Bachiler or
Batchelder was one of the ablest of the early New England preachers.
His marriage late in life to a woman regarded by his church as
disreputable induced him to return to England, where he enjoyed the
esteem and favor of Oliver Cromwell during the Protectorate.
Rivermouth Rocks are fair to see,
By dawn or sunset shone across,

When the ebb of the sea has left them free,
To dry their fringes of
gold-green moss
For there the river comes winding down,
From salt
sea-meadows and uplands brown,
And waves on the outer rocks
afoam
Shout to its waters, "Welcome home!"
And fair are the sunny isles in view
East of the grisly Head of the
Boar,
And Agamenticus lifts its blue
Disk of a cloud the woodlands
o'er;
And southerly, when the tide is down,
'Twixt white sea-waves
and sand-hills brown,
The beach-birds dance and the gray gulls wheel

Over a floor of burnished steel.
Once, in the old Colonial days,
Two hundred years ago and more,

A boat sailed down through the winding ways
Of Hampton River to
that low shore,
Full of a goodly company
Sailing out on the
summer sea,
Veering to catch the land-breeze light,
With the Boar
to left and the Rocks to right.
In Hampton meadows, where mowers laid
Their scythes to the swaths
of salted grass,
"Ah, well-a-day! our hay must be made!"
A young

man sighed, who saw them pass.
Loud laughed his fellows to see him
stand
Whetting his scythe with a listless hand,
Hearing a voice in a
far-off song,
Watching a white hand beckoning long.
"Fie on the witch!" cried a merry girl,
As they rounded the point
where Goody Cole
Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl,
A bent
and blear-eyed poor old soul.
"Oho!" she muttered, "ye 're brave
to-day!
But I hear the little waves laugh and say,
'The broth will be
cold that waits at home;
For it 's one to go, but another to come!'"
"She's cursed," said the skipper; "speak her fair:
I'm scary always to
see her shake
Her wicked head, with its wild gray hair,
And nose
like a hawk, and eyes like a snake."
But merrily still, with laugh and
shout,
From Hampton River the boat sailed out,
Till the huts and
the flakes on Star seemed nigh,
And they lost the scent of the pines of
Rye.
They dropped their lines in the lazy tide,
Drawing up haddock and
mottled cod;
They saw not the Shadow that walked beside,
They
heard not the feet with silence shod.
But thicker and thicker a hot
mist grew,
Shot by the lightnings through and through;
And
muffled growls, like the growl of a beast,
Ran along the sky from
west to east.
Then the skipper looked from the darkening sea
Up to the dimmed
and wading sun;
But he spake like a brave man cheerily,
"Yet there
is time for our homeward run."
Veering and tacking, they backward
wore;
And just as a breath-from the woods ashore
Blew out to
whisper of danger past,
The wrath of the storm came down at last!
The skipper hauled at the heavy sail
"God be our help!" he only cried,

As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail,
Smote the boat on its
starboard side.
The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone
Dark films of
rain-cloud slantwise blown,
Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare,


The strife and torment of sea and air.
Goody Cole looked out from her door
The Isles of Shoals were
drowned and gone,
Scarcely she saw the Head of the Boar
Toss the
foam from tusks of stone.
She clasped her hands with a grip of pain,

The tear on her cheek was not of