Beadle's Dime Novels No. 131 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

14 THE WRECKER’S DAUGHTER. being built up, further and farther in, to shiver into a thou- sand fragments the moment after. The hardy wreckers crept out of their huts, attired in their storm-suits, heedless of the sleety blast and of the icy spray which dashed over them, anxiously watching the turbulent sea, whose dull gray line mingled with the dull gray sky, until heaven and earth appeared rolling and heaving together. It was an awful storm !—yet such is the force of habit, and the selfishness of human nature, that many of these rough pco- ple, swarming out of their miserable cottages, rejoiced in it, as they would have rejoiced in summer at the prospect of a heavy haul of mackerel. It was dull, waiting week after week for the profit and excitement of a wreck. If these weather-beaten fellows, in their tarry jackets, with the odor of fish and tobacco hovering about them as naturally as sweetness about roses, had been in the habit of saying their prayers, they would pray for a wreck as piously as for fish— it would have been another form of asking for their daily bread. Sometime in the afternoon, out of a queer little hut on the beach, near Squall Inlet, came two persons. It would have puzzled an observer to say whether this human habitation belonged most to the land or water ; it was a queer, amphibi- ous sort of house, equally at home on either, or at least look- ed so. Built of the stranded fragments of many a goodly ship, there stood at the bow, or front door, the faded and paint-worn figure of an admiral of the olden time, in cocked hat, pigtail and ruffles, but so buffeted by the winds and waves of forturie, that his very nose was battered in, and his once florid cheeks gray with wooden troubles. A mast, cut away in time of peril from some luckless vessel, was nailed to the rear, and from its head fluttered ever, in sunshine or a ragged bit of the stripes and stars. “The Jolly . Jack” her owner had named his land-craft, whose nautical air was very much envied by many of his neighbors. Out of this “Jolly” affair, into the beating tempest, came a man and a girl. The former was, perhaps, sixty years of age, but still as unshaken in his strength as a rock. A pair of long-legged boots were drawn over his trowsers, and two or three layers of woolen jacket encrusted him. Te was prepared for a skirmish with the elements. > cEomicbooksicom eas Ss -lCll e