f former human habitation except a few of
those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame houses
and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found there
after the cataclysm--a cow! But how that solitary cow survived the
fury of a storm-flood that actually rent the island in twain has ever
remained a mystery ...

III.

On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees--when
there are any trees--all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright,
hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic
in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I
remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line
against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and
wind-blown hair,--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately
northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being
pursued indeed;--for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a
mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry:
far out you can see, through a good glass, the porpoises at play where
of old the sugar-cane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins
now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build
dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams--whole
forests of drift--huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress.
Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea
struggles to destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands and
the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically,
than the clouds of heaven.

And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made
their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,--usually at
some long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just
where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a multitude of
blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,--some high enough
to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to
enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous white
growths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument.
These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,--so long drowned that the
shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the
beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast broken
columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out
mutila