The Tent on the Beach | Page 3

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 rain?"They are lost," she muttered, "boat and crew!?Lord, forgive me! my words were true!"
Suddenly seaward swept the squall;?The low sun smote through cloudy rack;?The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all?The trend of the coast lay hard and black.?But far and wide as eye could reach,?No life was seen upon wave or beach;?The boat that went