ollow eddy showed the resistance which the liquid element
received.

The moment they were fairly buried in the water, the old man clasped
his hands together, and said, "Blessed be the tide that will break
over and bury ye forever! Sad to mariners, and sorrowful to maids
and mothers, has the time been you have choked up this deep and
bonnie bay. For evil were you sent, and for evil have you continued.
Every season finds from you its song of sorrow and wail, its funeral
processions, and its shrouded corses. Woe to the land where the
wood grew that made ye! Cursed be the axe that hewed ye on the
mountains, the hands that joined ye together, the bay that ye first
swam in, and the wind that wafted ye here! Seven times have ye put
my life in peril, three fair sons have you swept from my side,
and two bonnie grand-bairns; and now, even now, your waters foam
and flash for my destruction, did I venture my infirm limbs in
quest of food in your deadly bay. I see by that ripple and that
foam, and hear by the sound and singing of your surge, that ye
yearn for another victim; but it shall not be me nor mine."

Even as the old mariner addressed himself to the wrecked ships, a
young man appeared at the southern extremity of the bay, holding
his halve-net in his hand, and hastening into the current. Mark
rose, and shouted, and waved him back from a place which, to a person
unacquainted with the dangers of the bay, real and superstitious,
seemed sufficiently perilous: his grand-daughter, too, added her
voice to his, and waved her white hands; but the more they strove,
the faster advanced the peasant, till he stood to his middle in the
water, while the tide increased every moment in depth and strength.
"Andrew, Andrew," cried the young woman, in a voice quavering with
emotion, "turn, turn, I tell you: O the ships, the Haunted Ships!"
But the appearance of a fine run of fish had more influence with
the peasant than the voice of bonnie Barbara, and forward he dashed,
net in hand. In a moment he was borne off his feet, and mingled
like foam with the water, and hurried toward the fatal eddies which
whirled and roared round the sunken ships. But he was a powerful
young man, and an expert swimmer: he seized on one of the projecting
ribs of the nearest hulk, and clinging to it with the grasp of
despair, uttered yell after yell, sustaining himself against the
prodigious rush of the current.

From a shealing of turf and straw, within the pitch