D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 116: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XIV. THE LODESTONE OF FRIENDSHIP. Storms are sometimes proportioned in their duration by their violence. Those which cross the Atlantic are tropical in this respect. Hours after the last three blasts, as foretold by the experienced Pedro, over the sea a calmness reigned. The clouds condensed and fell in sheets. ‘This fall appeased the waves and spread an oily film which grew more even each moment. The crescent moon sailed serenely in larger and larger lakes of azure, and caused the drip from the inundated cliffs to resemble silvery cascades. When the under- mined rocks dropped from the edges, they sent up jets of spray, glittering as if diamonds had been unearthed anid ‘were sprinkled about by the Naiads’ hands. In other places, great masses of seaweed, dredged out of depths, trailed down from where 'they had been loftily flung and burst their grape-like Dulbs with crackling, like twigs burning. Between rocks, fragments of timber stuck up as if a dying warrior ‘had planted tis standard there before giving up the ghost. Rags of sailcloth seemed to en- velop dead bodies, while the really dead were wantonly chasing each other in little whirlpools. Ropes wound round pinnacle rocks, iron bolts were stuck in honeycombed piles like pins on a paper; deck euns were mounted in inaccessible points half way up the bluffs. It was like a Titanic battlefield, along the shore, where a facetious giant had amused himself by fantastically arranging the ruins. San Sebastian had been badly damaged. One of the towers on the Mole was headless. Under the truncated mass, the least of the two galleys had been wrecked in trying to steer through the narrow entrance. The other had slipped in previously, but was aground under the Gomicdooks (C(O) im