Mary Heaton Vorse

“ You may say such things can't happen. But there are stranger legends than these that come from the Graveyard of the Atlantic; and if you don’t believe this you may go to Gurnet Reef station and they will tell you about it, and you can see Assunta Flores with her foreign eyes and her heavy dark hair, and you can see Mary Angus, whom she calls mother. And then if you go up to the old halfway house by the wagon track and climb the dune above you will find growing there clumps of rose bushes which in their season bloom with strange, exotic flowers. ”

“ This coast is strewn with bones of dead ships; a sand cliff borders the ocean, and every now and then, at some great storm, the sea breaks in through the sand barrier and hurls inland the wreck of a vessel, and in time the shifting sand buries it and perhaps uncovers it again before the eyes of some other generation.
The towns of this wild country border the bay. The back country comes to their very gardens—an impenetrable tract of marsh, heath, and woodland, after that the cruel and encroaching dunes. Back country, dunes, and sea are all of them untamed ”

“ The men of the coast guards are an odd people, when you come to think of it, and a queer kind of life they live; their thoughts are forever concentrated on the sea and on the vessels moving over the surface of the sea. ”

“ These towns cannot escape the imminent tragedy of the sea nor the splendid austerity of the unconquerable seacoast which, in some parts, has not given man a foothold since the Pilgrims first made their adventurous landing.
These towns breed brave men and women, and occasionally a lad like David Ellison grows up, who seems to be kin to the sea and to the lonely and savage coast. ”

“ The men who have grown old in the service are both grave and friendly; they sense things other people do not perceive; they have a knowledge of storms and a way of being able to know the shapes of vessels which to common, eyes are only undistinguishable spots on the horizon.
All night long the men guard the coast and inform the stations of the fates of vessels. By day the men sit looking out to sea; they are isolated as though they were on board ship. Sand, sky, sea, and the vessels sailing the sea bound their lives. Many stations are in distant places, hard to get at ”

“ There were a few summer cottages not far from Dead Man’s Bar. Here the coast rises up sheerly and there is a far view of the sea; a few daring people who can bear isolation have built cottages near the neighboring farms. David assumed that she must have walked from there.
She didn't answer, and he repeated what he had said. She looked away from him, as though trying to see through the fog. ”

“ He had no more fear of her than if she had been a little girl, though in the presence of all women except Mary Angus he had been dumb, and he feared them all and disliked many, for they lived herded in towns. ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1966, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”