ar
at last that to some wanderers, at least, Sybaris had some hospitality.
A long, low spit made out into the sea, with never a house on it, but
brown with storm-worn shrubs, above the line of which were the
stone-pines and chestnuts which had first given character to the shore.
Hard for us, if we had been flung on the outside of this spit. But we
were not. Else I had not been writing here to-day. We passed it by fifty
fathom clear. Of course under its lee was our harbor. Battista let go
the halyards in a moment, and the wet sails came rattling down. The old
man, the boy, Battista, and I seized the best sweeps he had left. Two of
us at each, working on the same side, we brought her head round as fast
as she would bear it in that fearful sea. Inch by inch we wrought along
to the smoother water, and breathed free at last, as we came under the
partial protection of the friendly shore.

Battista and his brother then hauled up the sail enough to give such
headway to the boat as we thought our sweeps would control. And we crept
along the shore for an hour, seeing nothing but reeds, and now and then
a distant buffalo, when at last a very hard knock on a rock the boy
ahead had not seen under water started the planks so that we knew that
was dangerous play; and, without more solicitation, the old man beached
the boat in a little cove where the reeds gave place for a trickling
stream. I told them they might land or not, as they pleased. I would go
ashore and get assistance or information. The old man clearly thought I
was going to ask my assistance from the father of lies himself. But he
was resigned to my will,--said he would wait for my return. I stripped,
and waded ashore with my clothes upon my head, dressed as quickly as I
could, and pushed up from the beach to the low upland.

Clearly enough I was in a civilized country. Not that there was a
gallows, as the old joke says; but there were tracks in the shingle of
the beach showing where wheels had been, and these led me to a
cart-track between high growths of that Mediterranean reed which grows
all along in those low flats. There is one of the reeds on the hooks
above my gun in the hall as you came in. I followed up the track, but
without seeing barn, house, horse, or man, for a quarter of a mile,
perhaps, when behold,--

Not the footprint of a man! as to Robinson Crusoe;--

Not a gallows and man hanging! as in the sailor story above named;--

But a railroad track! Evide