nerous
treatment from a stranger was fully appreciated, and I determined to
push on to Morehead City, from which place it would be convenient to
reach Newbern by rail without changing my established route southward,
as I would be compelled to do if the regular water route of the Neuse
River from Pamplico Sound were followed.

On this Saturday night, spent at Hatteras Inlet, there broke upon us one
of the fiercest tempests I ever witnessed, even in the tropics. My
pedestrian tramp down the shore had scarcely ended when it commenced in
reality. For miles along the beach thousands of acres of land were soon
submerged by the sea and by the torrents of water which fell from the
clouds. While for a moment the night was dark as Erebus, again the
vivid flash of lightning exposed to view the swaying forests and the
gloomy sound. The sea pounded on the beach as if asking for admission to
old Pamplico. It seemed to say, I demand a new inlet; and, as though
trying to carry out its desire, sent great waves rolling up the shingle
and over into the hollows among the hills, washing down the low sand
dunes as if they also were in collusion with it to remove this frail
barrier, this narrow strip of low land which separated the Atlantic
from the wide interior sheet of water.

The phosphorescent sea, covered with its tens of millions of animalcula,
each one a miniature light-house, changed in color from inky blackness
to silver sheen. Will the ocean take to itself this frail foothold?--we
queried. Will it ingulf us in its insatiable maw, as the whale did
Jonah? There was no subsidence, no pause in the storm. It howled,
bellowed, and screeched like a legion of demons, so that the crashing of
falling trees, and the twisting of the sturdy live-oak's toughest limbs,
could hardly be heard in the din. Yet during this wild night my
storm-hardened companion sat with his pretty wife by the open fireplace,
as unmoved as though we were in the shelter of a mountain side, while he
calmly discoursed of storms, shipwrecks, and terrible struggles for life
that this lonely coast had witnessed, which sent thrills of horror to
my heart.

While traversing the beach during the afternoon, as wreck after wreck,
the gravestones of departed ships, projected their timbers from the
sands, I had made a calculation of the number of vessels which had left
their hulls to rot on Hatteras beach since the ships of Sir Walter
Raleigh had anchored above the cape, and it r