de and sun.
Sometimes, in calms of closing day,
They watched the spectral mirage play,
Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh,
And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky.

Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,
Stooped low upon the darkening main,
Piercing the waves along its track
With the slant javelins of rain.
And when west-wind and sunshine warm
Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm,
They saw the prismy hues in thin spray showers
Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth flowers.

And when along the line of shore
The mists crept upward chill and damp,
Stretched, careless, on their sandy floor
Beneath the flaring lantern lamp,
They talked of all things old and new,
Read, slept, and dreamed as idlers do;
And in the unquestioned freedom of the tent,
Body and o'er-taxed mind to healthful ease unbent.

Once, when the sunset splendors died,
And, trampling up the sloping sand,
In lines outreaching far and wide,
The white-waned billows swept to land,
Dim seen across the gathering shade,
A vast and ghostly cavalcade,
They sat around their lighted kerosene,
Hearing the deep bass roar their every pause between.

Then, urged thereto, the Editor
Within his full portfolio dipped,
Feigning excuse while seaching for
(With secret pride) his manuscript.
His pale face flushed from eye to beard,
With nervous cough his throat he cleared,
And, in a voice so tremulous it betrayed
The anxious fondness of an author's heart, he read:

. . . . .

THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH

The Goody Cole who figures in this poem and The Changeling as Eunice
Cole, who for a quarter of a century or more was feared, persecuted, and
hated as the witch of Hampton. She lived alone in a hovel a little
distant from the spot where the Hampton Academy now stands, and there
she died, unattended. When her death was discovered, she was hastily
covered up in the earth near by, and a stake driven through her body, to
exorcise the evil spirit. Rev. Stephen Bachiler or Batchelder was one of
the ablest of the early New England preachers. His marriage late in life
to a woman regarded by his church as disreputable induced him to return
to England, where he enjoyed the esteem and favor of Oliver Cromwell
during the Protector