were rolling in the trough,--casks of wine. Perhaps it was the
Manila,--perhaps the Nautilus!

A dead cow floated near enough for Mateo to throw his rope over
one horn; and they all helped to get it out. It was a milch cow
of some expensive breed; and the owner's brand had been burned
upon the horns:--a monographic combination of the letters A and
P. Feliu said he knew that brand: Old-man Preaulx, of
Belle-Isle, who kept a sort of dairy at Last Island during the
summer season, used to mark all his cows that way. Strange!

But, as they worked on, they began to see stranger things,--white
dead faces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or
the faces of drowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run
strongly, and these were passing out with it on the other side of
the mouth of the bayou;--perhaps they had been washed into the
marsh during the night, when the great rush of the sea came.
Then the three men left the water, and retired to higher ground
to scan the furrowed Gulf;--their practiced eyes began to search
the courses of the sea-currents,--keen as the gaze of birds that
watch the wake of the plough. And soon the casks and the drift
were forgotten; for it seemed to them that the tide was heavy
with human dead--passing out, processionally, to the great open.
Very far, where the huge pitching of the swells was diminished by
distance into a mere fluttering of ripples, the water appeared as
if sprinkled with them;--they vanished and became visible again
at irregular intervals, here and there--floating most thickly
eastward!--tossing, swaying patches of white or pink or blue or
black each with its tiny speck of flesh-color showing as the sea
lifted or lowered the body. Nearer to shore there were few; but