flashes are,--sheet-lightning of breakers,--and over the weird wash of
corpses coming in.

It is the steam-call of the relief-boat, hastening to rescue the
living, to gather in the dead.

The tremendous tragedy is over!

Out of the Sea's Strength

I.

There are regions of Louisiana coast whose aspect seems not of the
present, but of the immemorial past--of that epoch when low flat
reaches of primordial continent first rose into form above a Silurian
Sea. To indulge this geologic dream, any fervid and breezeless day
there, it is only necessary to ignore the evolutional protests of a few
blue asters or a few composite flowers of the coryopsis sort, which
contrive to display their rare flashes of color through the general
waving of cat-heads, blood-weeds, wild cane, and marsh grasses. For,
at a hasty glance, the general appearance of this marsh verdure is
vague enough, as it ranges away towards the sand, to convey the idea of
amphibious vegetation,--a primitive flora as yet undecided whether to
retain marine habits and forms, or to assume terrestrial ones;--and the
occasional inspection of surprising shapes might strengthen this fancy.
Queer flat-lying and many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in
juiciness and color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time
to time; the moist and weighty air seems heated rather from below than
from above,--less by the sun than by the radiation of a cooling world;
and the mists of morning or evening appear to simulate the vapory
exhalation of volcanic forces,--latent, but only dozing, and
uncomfortably close to the surface. And indeed geologists have
actually averred that those rare elevations of the soil,--which, with
their heavy coronets of evergreen foliage, not only look like islands,
but are so called in the French nomenclature of the coast,--have been
prominences created by ancient mud volcanoes.

The family of a Spanish fisherman, Feliu Viosca, once occupied and gave
its name to such an islet, quite close to the Gulf-shore,--the loftiest
bit of land along fourteen miles of just such marshy coast as I have
spoken of. Landward, it dominated a desolation that wearied the eye to
look at, a wilderness of reedy sloughs, patched at intervals with
ranges of bitter-weed, tufts of elbow-bushes, and broad reaches of
saw-grass, stretching away to a bluish-green line of woods that closed
the horizon, and imperfectly drained in the driest season by a slimy
littl