D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 16: what you’re looking at

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

DARTAGNAN, THE KINGMAKER. CHAPTER I. AVOID A NEW INN. In the middle of the seventeenth century, to the west of San Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay, then a fortified port (and not a watering-place) of northern Spain, was a hamlet known ephemerally as Las Salinas. It was salty in every respect, but salt had failed to preserve it; on the contrary, salt had ‘been its ruin. It was a cove beneath a highland, where the sea incur- sions had made a delta—the point inland—and smoothed the finely-grounded granite sands into flats, furrowed by ditches as regular as if traced by human hands; these were salt pans for which Nature consulted no engineer. A fisher, perceiving this advantage, had begun salt making on a fair scale, augmenting his plant by the as- sistance of his family, and finally his fellows in the craft, of which the Apostles were the patrons. soon the growth of the little saltern was strengthened by disabled seamen, discharged soldiers, since the great wars were presumed over between Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria—agegressors, allies and combatants by turns. At the end came rovers, sea gypsies, not averse to a few days’ work where the alguazils and constables would not suspect them to be honest toilers. In time, Salinas gained aname. As the cove, though exposed to the very focus of storms, was deep in its channel, and the highlands partly shielded it, small craft dropped in. Petty fishers, sardineers, tunny catchers, and even the cod fishers, stopping to cure a catch, instead of going home, so that they could continue with the “buckalow” to vend on the African coast. They COMME IOOKS.(EO) =)