ody 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,