rom beets)
out of the scantiest materials. We turned our backs on the fisherman
and his squid-line. The signal station and the hull of the lost vessel
were only a shed and timber to him. How can any man be alive to the
significance of a wreck and fluttering flag which he sees twenty times
a day? Noah, no doubt, after a year in the ark, came to look upon it
as so much gopher-wood, and appreciated it as a good job of joinery
rather than a divine symbol.

We believe, however, that our readers will find in the wrecked Creole
and the wooden shed, and the practical facts concerning them, matter
suggestive enough to hold them a little space. They fill a yet
unwritten page in the history of our government, and of great and
admirable work done by it, of which the nation at large has been
given but partial knowledge. Or, if we choose to look more deeply into
things, we may find in the old hulk and commonplace building hints as
significant of the Infinite Order and Power underlying all ordinary
things, and of our relations to it, as in the long-ago Deluge and the
ark riding over it.

The little wooden house stands upon a lonely stretch of coast in Ocean
county, New Jersey. Several miles of low barren marshes and sands gray
with poverty-grass on the north separate it from Manasquan Inlet and
the pine woods and scattered farm-houses which lie along its shore,
while half a mile below, on the south, is the head of Barnegat Bay,
a deep, narrow estuary which runs into and along the Jersey coast for
more than half its extent, leaving outside a strip of sandy beach,
never more than a mile wide. All kinds of sea fish and fowl take
refuge in this bay and the interminable reedy marshes, and for a few
weeks in the snipe-and duck-season sportsmen from New York find their
way to "Shattuck's" and the houses of other old water-dogs along the
bay. But during the rest of the year the wooden shed and its occupants
are left to the companionship of the sea and the winds.

The little building (with a gigantic "No. 10" whitewashed outside)
stands close to the breakers, just above high-water mark in winter. It
is divided into two large rooms, upper and lower, with a tiny kitchen
in the rear and an equally comfortless bedroom overhead. The doors of
the lower room (which, like those of a barn, fill the whole end of the
house) being closed, we sought for Old Probabilities up stairs, and
found very little at first sight to gratify curiosity or any craving