nware pots and pans under the
lee of the sand hills and pine woods below the Capes.

Sometimes on Sundays, when the Rev. Hillary Jones would be preaching
in the little log church back in the woods, these half-clad red
savages would come in from the cold, and sit squatting in the back
part of the church, listening stolidly to the words that had no
meaning for them.

But about the wreck of the bark in 1686. Such a wreck as that which
then went ashore on the Hen-and-Chicken Shoals was a godsend to the
poor and needy settlers in the wilderness where so few good things
ever came. For the vessel went to pieces during the night, and the
next morning the beach was strewn with wreckage--boxes and barrels,
chests and spars, timbers and planks, a plentiful and bountiful
harvest to be gathered up by the settlers as they chose, with no one
to forbid or prevent them.

The name of the bark, as found painted on some of the water barrels
and sea chests, was the _Bristol Merchant_, and she no doubt hailed
from England.

As was said, the only soul who escaped alive off the wreck was Tom
Chist.

A settler, a fisherman named Matt Abrahamson, and his daughter Molly,
found Tom. He was washed up on the beach among the wreckage, in a
great wooden box which had been securely tied around with a rope and
lashed between two spars--apparently for better protection in beating
through the surf. Matt Abrahamson thought he had found something of
more than usual value when he came upon this chest; but when he cut
the cords and broke open the box with his broadax, he could not have
been more astonished had he beheld a salamander instead of a baby of
nine or ten months old lying half smothered in the blankets that
covered the bottom of the chest.

Matt Abrahamson's daughter Molly had had a baby who had died a month
or so before. So when she saw the little one lying there in the bottom
of the chest, she cried out in a great loud voice that the Good Man
had sent her another baby in place of her own.

The rain was driving before the hurricane storm in dim, slanting
sheets, and so she wrapped up the baby in the man's coat she wore and
ran off home without waiting to gather up any more of the wreckage.

It was Parson Jones who gave the foundling his name. When the news
came to his ears of what Matt Abrahamson had found he went over to the
fisherman's cabin to see the child. He examined the clothes in which
the baby was dressed. They were of fine line