read the sarvice. Everythin' went
lovely, and just at the proper time we tilted the plank, and he
slipped off without a hitch of any kind. Arter the mate finished the
readin', he said, 'Men, there's a good man gone arter a long life of
great usefulness. He were a sailor and a gentleman. I don't think as
we ought for to cry over sich a man, and I propose we giv' him three
cheers and God bless him'; and heartier cheers was never giv' than we
giv' that day, arter which all hands got dinner."

"----MAS HAS COME."

BY LEONARD KIP.

_Overland Monthly, January, 1870._

It was called Beacon Ledge fully fifty years before the present
lighthouse had been built upon it. For it was said that long ago, when
wrecking was a profitable trade along the coast, and goodly vessels
were frequently, by false lights, decoyed to their destruction, there
was no more favorable point for the exercise of that systematic
villainy than this rocky, high-lifted bluff. Projecting three or four
hundred feet into the sea, with a gradually curved, sweeping line, it
formed, to be sure, upon the one side, a limited anchorage--safe
enough for those who knew it; but, upon the other side, it looked upon
a waste of shoal, dotted, here and there, at lowest tide, with craggy
breakers, and, at high water, smooth, smiling, and deceitful, with the
covered dangers. Here, then, upon certain dark and stormy nights, the
flaming beacon of destruction would glow brightly against the black
sky, and wildly lighten up the cruel faces of those who stood by and
piled on the fagots, while gazing eagerly out to sea to mark the
effect of their evil machinations. Nor was it until some thirty years
ago that the gangs of wretches were thoroughly broken up, and this,
their favorite vantage-ground, wrested from them, and the tall, white
lighthouse there securely founded--maintaining in mercy what had
before been held as a blighting curse; lifting itself, like a nation's
warning finger, and with its calm, serene glow, pointing out the path
of safety. Then, in the mouths of all the surrounding inhabitants,
Beacon Ledge became known as Beacon Ledge Beacon, and so kept its
name, in spite of tautological criticism, or of different and more
formal christening, by Government authority.

Still, there hung around the place the memories or traditions of past
violence, shipwreck, and murder--partly true, perhaps, but, doubtless,
generally false, having only a few grains of fact or