beside them, were securely fastened by chains to stakes and piles
driven in the marsh, while heaps of broken and disjointed bamboo
orange crates, held together by ropes of fibre, glistened like
ligamented bones heaped in the dead valley. Masts, spars,
fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and
galleys, and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had
ceased their wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the
sea. The legend on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow,
served for mortuary inscription. Wailed over by the trade winds,
mourned by lamenting sea-birds, once every year the tide visited
its lost dead and left them wet with its tears.

To such a spot and its surroundings the atmosphere of tradition and
mystery was not wanting. Six years ago Boone Culpepper had built
the house, and brought to it his wife--variously believed to be a
gypsy, a Mexican, a bright mulatto, a Digger Indian, a South Sea
princess from Tahiti, somebody else's wife--but in reality a little
Creole woman from New Orleans, with whom he had contracted a
marriage, with other gambling debts, during a winter's vacation
from his home in Virginia. At the end of two years she had died,
succumbing, as differently stated, from perpetual wet feet, or the
misanthropic idiosyncrasies of her husband, and leaving behind her
a girl of twelve and a boy of sixteen to console him. How futile
was this bequest may be guessed from a brief summary of Mr.
Culpepper's peculiarities. They were the development of a singular
form of aggrandizement and misanthropy. On his arrival at Logport
he had bought a part of the apparently valueless Dedlow Marsh from
the Government at less than a dollar an acre, continuing his
singular investment year by year until he was the owner of three
leagues of amphibious domain. It was then discovered that this