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Tales of the Chesapeake by George Alfred Townsend
page 19 of 335 (05%)
go ashore on that coast, where five successive lighthouses warn the
commerce of the Atlantic off, but are unable to intimidate the storms
which sweep the low shores and almost threaten to leap over the
peninsula and submerge it. Chincoteague lies like a tongue between two
inlets, and partly protrudes into the sea, but is also sheltered in
part by the bar of Assateague, whose light has flamed for years.
Chincoteague is about ten miles long, and behind it an inland bay
stretches continuously, under various names, for thirty miles,
protected from the ocean, and scarcely flavored with its salt, except
near the outlet at Chincoteague, where the oysters lie in the brackish
sluices, and all sorts of fish, from shrimps to sharks, hover around
the oyster beds. In the green depths they can be seen, and there the
crab darts sidewise, like a shooting star. In the sandy beach grows
the mamano, or snail-clam, putting his head from his shell at high
tide to suck nutrition from the mysterious food of the sea, and giving
back such chowder to man as makes the eater feel his stomach to
possess a nobility above the pleasures of the brain. The bay of
Chincoteague is five or six miles wide, and the nearest hamlet is in
Virginia, as is Chincoteague island also. The hamlet takes the name of
Horntown, and not far from there is the old court-house seat of Snow
Hill, in Maryland. Every soul on Chincoteague was native there or
thereabout, except Issachar the Jew.

He had appeared amongst them after a sudden storm, the solitary
survivor of a wreck that had partly drifted ashore, and, as he said,
gone down with all his fortune. The mild air and easy livelihood of
the spot pleased the Jew, after his first despair, and he set about
making another fortune. Capable, solitary and active, he soon
outstripped all the people of the islands, and neither beloved nor
unbeloved, lived grimly, as chance ordained, and until now, had never
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