Beadle's Dime Novels No. 131 — page 5: what you’re looking at

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

THE WRECKERS DAUGHTER. a CHAPTER I. THE NIGHT WATCH. Tr was a night. in the winter of 1855, wild and stormy, dark and cold—so wild and stormy that the inhabitants of the city shuddered inside of their warm, dwellings. How pitiless, then, must have been that night on the sea! the great, boiling, roaring ocean, which rolled its black billows under the black sky, but a few miles from all these peaceful lighted homes, whose dwellers, few of them, thought of the tragedies being enacted a little way off. In a mansion on one of the up-town avenuesof New York © city a gentleman was pacing earnestly up and length of the library floor, ill at ease, for to him the meaning. Just as he was leaving his warehouse afternoon a message came from the pilot-station that the clipper ship Flying Cloud had been sighted off Barnegat beach laboring heavily to stand off the coast—that treacherous Coast upon whose sands so many a ship had stranded, and every of whose wide stretch of beach had received the bodies of drowned men, women and children. All day long the cold north-easter had blown, steadily increasing in strength, until, as night came on, the earth fairly shook under its shocks. There were voices in the air which were not moans but shrieks, as if the demons of the unseen world were hold- ing wild riot—such voices as always made ship-owners thought- ful and sailers anxious. Off Barnegat! No wonder the merchant paced his floor restlessly. Not only did he own half of the superb clipper—whose fame as a fust sailor was world-wide—but the whole of her cargo was . do the | 8 had — e-/ Comichbooks.com