uite deserted, I rambled about near the beach for an hour
or more. The fine weather seemed, somehow, to add loneliness to the
place, and when I came upon a spot where a grave was marked I went no
farther. Returning to the head of the cove, I came to a sort of
Calvary, it appeared to me, where navigators, carrying their cross,
had each set one up as a beacon to others coming after. They had
anchored here and gone on, all except the one under the little mound.
One of the simple marks, curiously enough, had been left there by the
steamship _Colimbia_, sister ship to the _Colombia_, my neighbor of
that morning.

I read the names of many other vessels; some of them I copied in my
journal, others were illegible. Many of the crosses had decayed and
fallen, and many a hand that put them there I had known, many a hand
now still. The air of depression was about the place, and I hurried
back to the sloop to forget myself again in the voyage.

Early the next morning I stood out from Borgia Bay, and off Cape Quod,
where the wind fell light, I moored the sloop by kelp in twenty
fathoms of water, and held her there a few hours against a three-knot
current. That night I anchored in Langara Cove, a few miles farther
along, where on the following day I discovered wreckage and goods
washed up from the sea. I worked all day now, salving and boating off
a cargo to the sloop. The bulk of the goods was tallow in casks and in
lumps from which the casks had broken away; and embedded in the
seaweed was a barrel of wine, which I also towed alongside. I hoisted
them all in with the throat-halyards, which I took to the windlass.
The weight of some of the casks was a little over eight hundred
pounds.

[Illustration: Salving wreckage.]

There were no Indians about Langara; evidently there had not been any
since the great gale which had washed the wreckage on shore. Probably
it was the same gale that drove the _Spray_ off Cape Horn, from March
3 to 8. Hundreds of tons of kelp had been torn from beds in deep water
and rolled up into ridges on the beach. A specimen stalk which I found
entire, roots, leaves, and all, measured one hundred and thirty-one
feet in length. At this place I filled a barrel of water at night, and
on the following day sailed with a fair wind at last.

I had not sailed far, however, when I came abreast of more tallow in a
small cove, where I anchored, and boated off as before. It rained and
snowed hard all that day, and it w