m, the gale was
rending off the heads of the waves and veiling the horizon with a fog
of salt spray. Shadowless and gray the day remained; there were mad
bursts of lashing rain. Evening brought with it a sinister apparition,
looming through a cloud-rent in the west--a scarlet sun in a green sky.
His sanguine disk, enormously magnified, seemed barred like the body of
a belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and the
moonless night came.

Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice
moaning across the world,--hooting,--uttering nightmare
sounds,--Whoo!--whoo!--whoo!--and with each stupendous owl-cry the
mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through
all the hours of darkness. From the northwest the breakers of the bay
began to roll high over the sandy slope, into the salines;--the village
bayou broadened to a bellowing flood ... So the tumult swelled and the
turmoil heightened until morning,--a morning of gray gloom and
whistling rain. Rain of bursting clouds and rain of wind-blown brine
from the great spuming agony of the sea.

The steamer Star was due from St. Mary's that fearful morning. Could
she come? No one really believed it,--no one. And nevertheless men
struggled to the roaring beach to look for her, because hope is
stronger than reason ...

Even today, in these Creole islands, the advent of the steamer is the
great event of the week. There are no telegraph lines, no telephones:
the mail-packet is the only trustworthy medium of communication with
the outer world, bringing friends, news, letters. The magic of steam
has placed New Orleans nearer to New York than to the Timbaliers,
nearer to Washington than to Wine Island, nearer to Chicago than to
Barataria Bay. And even during the deepest sleep of waves and winds
there will come betimes to sojourners in this unfamiliar archipelago a
feeling of lonesomeness that is a fear, a feeling of isolation from the
world of men,--totally unlike that sense of solitude which haunts one
in the silence of mountain-heights, or amid the eternal tumult of lofty
granitic coasts: a sense of helpless insecurity.

The land seems but an undulation of the sea-bed: its highest ridges do
not rise more than the height of a man above the salines on either
side;--the salines themselves lie almost level with the level of the
flood-tides;--the tides are variable, treacherous, mysterious. But
when all around an