KING OF CHINCOTEAGUE.


The night before Christmas, frosty moonlight, the outcast preacher
came down to the island shore and raised his hands to the stars.

"O God! whose word I so long preached in meekness and sincerity," he
cried, "have mercy on my child and its mother, who are poor as were
Thine own this morning, eighteen hundred and forty years ago!"

The moonlight scarcely fretted the soft expanse of Chincoteague Bay.
There seemed a slender hand of silver reaching down from the sky to
tremble on the long chords of the water, lying there in light and
shade, like a harp. The drowsy dash of the low surf on the bar beyond
the inlet was harsh to this still and shallow haven for wreckers and
oystermen. It was very far from any busy city or hive of men, between
the ocean and the sandy peninsula of Maryland.

But no land is so remote that it may not have its banished men. The
outcast preacher had committed the one deadly sin acknowledged amongst
those wild wreckers and watermen. It was not that he had knocked a
drowning man in the head, nor shown a false signal along the shore to
decoy a vessel into the breakers, nor darkened the lighthouse lamp.
These things had been done, but not by him.

He had married out of his race. His wife was crossed with despised