At noon or later, after the ruin of Last Island, a gentleman of a name renowned in South-western story found himself clinging to a bush in the wild waters, lashed by the long whips of branches, half dead with fatigue and fear.  For a time the hurly-burly blinded and hid everything, and the long roll rocked and tore at him in desperate endeavor to wrench loose his bleeding fingers.  The impulse of the wind and storm at such a time is as of a solid body, and there is a look of solidity in the very appearance of the magnificent force.  But as it abated he thought he heard a faint cry, and looking around he saw a poor girl in the ribbons of her night-dress clinging to a branch, and slipping from her feeble hold.  Tired as he was, and wild and dangerous as the attempt might be, he did not dare to leave her to perish.  Choosing his time in a lull, he struck out to the bush, and reached it just as her ebbing strength gave way.  He took her in his sturdy arms, and, clinging with tooth and nail, stayed them both to their strange anchorage.  Faint, half conscious, disrobed as she was, in the sweet, delicate features, the curve of the lip, and the raven tresses clothed in seaweed, he recognized the Creole belle of last night’s hop.  He cheered and encouraged her, pointing out that the storm was abating, had abated.  It could not be long until search-boats came, and while he had strength to live she should share it.  It proved true.  Generous and hardy fishers and ships had come at once to the scene of disaster, and were busy picking up the few spared by wind and wave.  They found the two clinging together and to that slight bush, and took them off, wrapping them in ready, rough fishermen’s coats.  The reader can see the end of that story.  A meeting so appointed had its predestined end in a love-match.  So we leave it and them:  the rest of their lives belongs to them, not to us.

The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his wife.  For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together.  When I think of the husband’s manly care in thus abiding by the wife, I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only valued his life and hers at a few dollars—­not enough to compensate the traveler for the loss incurred as demurrage to the fishermen.

Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty.  It is as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the cataclysm of that dreadful night—­bones which now waste to whiteness on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the under-sea.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

[Footnote 1:  The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate chromoscope.  I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the former surpassing the idealization of the latter.]