nts over
mastered,--forced backward towards the marsh,--made to recoil by the
might of the ghostly enemy with whom they had striven a thousand
years,--the Shrieker, the Sky-Sweeper, the awful Sea-Wind!

Never had he given them so terrible a wrestle as on the night of the
tenth of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six. All the waves of the
excited Gulf thronged in as if to see, and lifted up their voices, and
pushed, and roared, until the cheniere was islanded by such a billowing
as no white man's eyes had ever looked upon before. Grandly the oaks
bore themselves, but every fibre of their knotted thews was strained in
the unequal contest, and two of the giants were overthrown, upturning,
as they fell, roots coiled and huge as the serpent-limbs of Titans.
Moved to its entrails, all the islet trembled, while the sea magnified
its menace, and reached out whitely to the prostrate trees; but the
rest of the oaks stood on, and strove in line, and saved the
habitations defended by them ...

II.

Before a little waxen image of the Mother and Child,--an odd little
Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a gift after one
of his Mexican voyages,--Carmen Viosca had burned candles and prayed;
sometimes telling her beads; sometimes murmuring the litanies she knew
by heart; sometimes also reading from a prayer-book worn and greasy as
a long-used pack of cards. It was particularly stained at one page, a
page on which her tears had fallen many a lonely night--a page with a
clumsy wood cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance,
shining through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel with
folded wings. And beneath this rudely wrought symbol of the Perpetual
Calm appeared in big, coarse type the title of a prayer that has been
offered up through many a century, doubtless, by wives of Spanish
mariners,--Contra las Tempestades.

Once she became very much frightened. After a partial lull the storm
had suddenly redoubled its force: the ground shook; the house quivered
and creaked; the wind brayed and screamed and pushed and scuffled at
the door; and the water, which had been whipping in through every
crevice, all at once rose over the threshold and flooded the dwelling.
Carmen dipped her finger in the water and tasted it. It was salt!

And none of Feliu's boats had yet come in;--doubtless they had been
driven into some far-away bayous by the storm. The only boat at the
settlement, the Carmencita,