It was a bleak, chilly afternoon as they toiled mile after mile along the beach, the Quaker woman far behind the others with her baby in her arms, carrying it, as she thought, to its death.  Overhead, flocks of dark-winged grakles swooped across the lowering sky, uttering from time to time their harsh, foreboding cry; shoreward, as far as the eye could see, the sand stretched in interminable yellow ridges, blackened here and there by tufts of dead palmetto-trees; while on the other side the sea had wrapped itself in a threatening silence and darkness.  A line of white foam crept out of it from horizon to horizon, dumb and treacherous, and licked the mother’s feet as she dragged herself heavily after the others.

From time to time the Indian stealthily peered over her shoulder, looking at the child’s thin face as it slept upon her breast.  As evening closed in, they came to a broad arm of the sea thrust inland through the beach, and halted at the edge.  Beyond it, in the darkness, they could distinguish the yet darker shapes of the wigwams, and savages gathered about two or three enormous fires that threw long red lines of glare into the sea-fog.  “As we stood there for many Hour’s Time,” says Jonathan Dickenson, “we were assured these Dreadful Fires were prepared for us.”

Of all the sad little company that stand out against the far-off dimness of the past, in that long watch upon the beach, the low-voiced, sweet-tempered Quaker lady comes nearest and is the most real to us.  The sailors had chosen a life of peril years ago; her husband, with all his suspicious bigotry, had, when pushed to extremes, an admirable tough courage with which to face the dangers of sea and night and death; and the white-headed old man, who stood apart and calm, had received, as much as Elijah of old, a Divine word to speak in the wilderness, and the life in it would sustain him through death.  But Mary Dickenson was only a gentle, commonplace woman, whose life had been spent on a quiet farm, whose highest ambition was to take care of her snug little house, and all of whose brighter thoughts or romance or passion began and ended in this staid Quaker and the baby that was a part of them both.  It was only six months ago that this first-born child had been laid in her arms; and as she lay on the white bed looking out on the spring dawning day after day, her husband sat beside her telling her again and again of the house he had made ready for her in Penn’s new settlement.  She never tired of hearing of it.  Some picture of this far-off home must have come to the poor girl as she stood now in the night, the sea-water creeping up to her naked feet, looking at the fires built, as she believed, for her child.

Toward midnight a canoe came from the opposite side, into which the chief put Barrow, Dickenson, the child, and its mother.  Their worst fears being thus confirmed, they crossed in silence, holding each other by the hand, the poor baby moaning now and then.  It had indeed been born tired into the world, and had gone moaning its weak life out ever since.