hey enter, where they find
That cursed man low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesly lockes long gronen and unbound,
Disordered hong about his shoulders round,
And hid his face, through which his hollow eyne
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw-bone cheekes, through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into the jawes, as he did never dine.
His garments nought but many ragged clouts,
With thornes together pind and patched reads,
The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts."

Southeast of Crossman's Isle lies Hood's Isle, or McCain's Beclouded
Isle; and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of
dark pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus's Landing. It
might fitly have been styled Charon's.

It received its name from a wild white creature who spent many years
here; in the person of a European bringing into this savage region
qualities more diabolical than are to be found among any of the
surrounding cannibals.

About half a century ago, Oberlus deserted at the above-named island,
then, as now, a solitude. He built himself a den of lava and clinkers,
about a mile from the Landing, subsequently called after him, in a vale,
or expanded gulch, containing here and there among the rocks about two
acres of soil capable of rude cultivation; the only place on the isle
not too blasted for that purpose. Here he succeeded in raising a sort of
degenerate potatoes and pumpkins, which from time to time he exchanged
with needy whalemen passing, for spirits or dollars.

His appearance, from all accounts, was that of the victim of some
malignant sorceress; he seemed to have drunk of Circe's cup; beast-like;
rags insufficient to hide his nakedness; his befreckled skin blistered
by continual exposure to the sun; nose flat; countenance contorted,
heavy, earthy; hair and beard unshorn, profuse, and of fiery red. He
struck strangers much as if he were a volcanic creature thrown up by the
same convulsion which exploded into sight the isle. All bepatched and
coiled asleep in his lonely lava den among the mountains, he looked,
they say, as a heaped drift of withered leaves, torn from autumn trees,
and so left in some hidden nook by the whirling halt for an instant of a
fierce night-wind, which then ruthlessly sweeps on, somewhere else to
repeat the capricious act. It is also reported to have been the
strangest sight, this same Oberlus, of a sultry