l. If he failed to do this, it was all very well too.

Back of the fisher huts, the rocks rose high and dark, and quite hid
the pine woods and the isthmus of yellow sand, and everything that
could make Culm at all cheery or pleasant. This eminence was Wind
Cliff, and served as a landmark for all the sailors whose path lay
along the coast. Around this the gulls were alway flitting and
screaming, and their nests were everywhere in the crevices of the
rocks. Bald and gray it rose, scarred and rent with storms and age,
and so steep as to be almost inaccessible. It fronted the north-west,
and from its sharp tip the rock sloped south to the sea, and held in
one of its great hollows down by the shore a house--such a house as
you would not have looked for at Culm--with walls of stone and tall,
ancient chimneys and deep-set windows, like eyes looking forever at
the sea.

It was so dark and weather-beaten that at first sight you might almost
fancy it to be but some quaint, odd shape which the rocks had taken,
by dint of the stress of winds and waves beating upon them for long
ages. But a house it was, and made by human hands, and human beings
dwelt in it. At night the red light from its windows streamed out upon
the water, and in many a dark and tempestuous watch had Skipper Ben
guided the "White Gull" into port through the friendly gleaming of
this beacon. For a long period of years the old house had stood empty
and tenantless, the windows and doors broken and gone, the wind
sweeping through and the rain beating in, and everything but the stout
walls and chimneys a ruin. The superstitious fishermen would not
inhabit it, and told tales of smugglers and pirates who made it their
haunt, with other fanciful stories which always seem to linger about
the sea, and in which there was not the faintest shadow of truth.
Desolate and neglected, it stood there year after year, till, one day,
Skipper Ben brought down carpenters and masons on the "White Gull,"
and straightway they went at work upon the old house. Doors went up,
windows went in, a piazza pushed itself out towards the sea-front,
and there was great bustle and activity about it for weeks. Then the
laborers went away, and when the skipper came again, he brought,
instead of groceries and store-cloth, a great quantity of furniture,
the like of which the poor people at Culm Rock had never seen, and
with the furniture came the master of the new house--a sorrowful,
bowed man--and