entablature and cornices. But a second glance showed it to be a
one-storied building, upheld above the Marsh by numberless piles placed
at regular distances; some of them sunken or inclined from the
perpendicular, increasing the first illusion. Between these pillars,
which permitted a free circulation of air, and, at extraordinary tides,
even the waters of the bay itself, the level waste of marsh, the bay,
the surges of the bar, and finally the red horizon line, were
distinctly visible. A railed gallery or platform, supported also on
piles, and reached by steps from the Marsh, ran around the building,
and gave access to the several rooms and offices.

But if the appearance of this lacustrine and amphibious dwelling was
striking, and not without a certain rude and massive grandeur, its
grounds and possessions, through which the brother and sister were
still picking their way, were even more grotesque and remarkable. Over
a space of half a dozen acres the flotsam and jetsam of years of tidal
offerings were collected, and even guarded with a certain care. The
blackened hulks of huge uprooted trees, scarcely distinguishable from
the fragments of genuine wrecks beside them, were securely fastened by
chains to stakes and piles driven in the marsh, while heaps of broken
and disjointed bamboo orange crates, held together by ropes of fibre,
glistened like ligamented bones heaped in the dead valley. Masts,
spars, fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and
galleys, and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had ceased
their wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the sea. The
legend on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow, served for
mortuary inscription. Wailed over by the trade winds, mourned by
lamenting sea-birds, once every year the tide visited its lost dead and
left them wet with its tears.

To such a spot and its surroundings the atmosphere of tradition and
mystery was not wanting. Six years ago Boone Culpepper had built the
house, and brought to it his wife--variously believed to be a gypsy, a
Mexican, a bright mulatto, a Digger Indian, a South Sea princess from
Tahiti, somebody else's wife--but in reality a little Creole woman from
New Orleans, with whom he had contracted a marriage, with other
gambling debts, during a winter's vacation from his home in Virginia.
At the end of two years she had died, succumbing, as differently
stated, from perpetual wet feet, or