sulky, gray cranes droop their motionless heads over the still salt
pools along the shore.

To this blank desolation I was forced to carry poor Jackson's body,
with that of the fever-patient, just at sunset. As the Dutchman who
officiated as hearse, sexton, bearer, and procession, stuck his spade
into the ground, and withdrew it full of crumbling shells and fine sand,
the hole it left filled with bitter black ooze. There, sunk in the ooze,
covered with the shifting sand, bewailed by the wild cries of sea-birds,
noteless and alone, I left Eben Jackson, and returned to the mass of
pestilence and wretchedness within the hospital walls.

In the spring I reached home safely. None but the resident on a Southern
sand-bank can fully appreciate the verdure and bloom of the North. The
great elms of my native town were full of tender buds, like a clinging
mist in their graceful branches; earlier trees were decked with little
leaves, deep-creased, and silvery with down; the wide river in a fluent
track of metallic lustre weltered through green meadows that on either
hand stretched far and wide; the rolling land beyond was spread out in
pastures, where the cattle luxuriated after the winter's stalling; and
on many a slope and plain the patient farmer turned up his heavy sods
and clay, to moulder in sun and air for seed-time and harvest; and the
beautiful valley that met the horizon on the north and south rolled away
eastward and westward to a low blue range of hills, that guarded it with
granite walls and bristling spears of hemlock and pine.

This is not my story; and if it were, I do not know that I should detail
my home-coming. It is enough to say, that I came after a five years'
absence, and found all that I had left nearly as I had left it;--how few
can say as much!