zon
and, in heavy weather, the breakers flying high over a deep sea reef.

From half-way down the hill, I had perceived the wreck of February last,
a brig of considerable tonnage, lying, with her back broken, high and dry
on the east corner of the sands; and I was making directly towards it,
and already almost on the margin of the turf, when my eyes were suddenly
arrested by a spot, cleared of fern and heather, and marked by one of
those long, low, and almost human-looking mounds that we see so commonly
in graveyards. I stopped like a man shot. Nothing had been said to me
of any dead man or interment on the island; Rorie, Mary, and my uncle had
all equally held their peace; of her at least, I was certain that she
must be ignorant; and yet here, before my eyes, was proof indubitable of
the fact. Here was a grave; and I had to ask myself, with a chill, what
manner of man lay there in his last sleep, awaiting the signal of the
Lord in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place? My mind supplied no
answer but what I feared to entertain. Shipwrecked, at least, he must
have been; perhaps, like the old Armada mariners, from some far and rich
land over-sea; or perhaps one of my own race, perishing within eyesight
of the smoke of home. I stood awhile uncovered by his side, and I could
have desired that it had lain in our religion to put up some prayer for
that unhappy stranger, or, in the old classic way, outwardly to honour
his misfortune. I knew, although his bones lay there, a part of Aros,
till the trumpet sounded, his imperishable soul was forth and far away,
among the raptures of the everlasting Sabbath or the pangs of hell; and
yet my mind misgave me even with a fear, that perhaps he was near me
where I stood, guarding his sepulchre, and lingering on the scene of his
unhappy fate.

Certainly it was with a spirit somewhat over-shadowed that I turned away
from the grave to the hardly less melancholy spectacle of the wreck. Her
stem was above the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a little
abaft the foremast--though indeed she had none, both masts having broken
short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the beach was very sharp and
sudden, and the bows lay many feet below the stern, the fracture gaped
widely open, and you could see right through her poor hull upon the
farther side. Her name was much defaced, and I could not make out
clearly whether she was called _Christiania_, after the Norwegian city,
or _C