Part 6

A wild, insane light came into Phil Adams's eyes, as he stood knee-deep in boiling surf, and for an instant I think he meditated plunging into the ocean after the receding boat.

The sky darkened, and an ugly look stole rapidly over the broken surface of the sea.

Binny Wallace half rose from his seat in the stern, and waved his hand to us in token of farewell. In spite of the distance, increasing every instant, we could see his face plainly. The anxious expression it wore at first had passed. It was pale and meek now, and I love to think there was a kind of halo about it, like that which painters place around the forehead of a saint. So he drifted away.

The sky grew darker and darker. It was only by straining our eyes through the unnatural twilight that we could keep the Dolphin in sight. The figure of Binny Wallace was no longer visible, for the boat itself had dwindled to a mere white dot on the black water. Now we lost it, and our hearts stopped throbbing; and now the speck appeared again, for an instant, on the crest of a high wave.

Finally it went out like a spark, and we saw it no more. Then we gazed at each other, and dared not speak.

Absorbed in following the course of the boat, we had scarcely noticed the huddled inky clouds that sagged down all around us. From these threatening masses, seamed at intervals with pale lightning, there now burst a heavy peal of thunder that shook the ground under our feet. A sudden squall struck the sea, ploughing deep white furrows into it, and at the same instant a single piercing shriek rose above the tempest,--the frightened cry of a gull swooping over the island. How it startled us!

It was impossible to keep our footing on the beach any longer. The wind and the breakers would have swept us into the ocean if we had not clung to each other with the desperation of drowning men. Taking advantage of a momentary lull, we crawled up the sands on our hands and knees, and, pausing in the lee of the granite ledge to gain breath, returned to the camp, where we found that the gale had snapped all the fastenings of the tent but one. Held by this, the puffed-out canvas swayed in the wind like a balloon. It was a task of some difficulty to secure it, which we did by beating down the canvas with the oars.

After several trials, we succeeded in setting up the tent on the leeward side of the ledge. Blinded by the vivid flashes of lightning, and drenched by the rain, which fell in torrents, we crept, half dead with fear and anguish, under our flimsy shelter. Neither the anguish nor the fear was on our own account, for we were comparatively safe, but for poor little Binny Wallace, driven out to sea in the merciless gale. We shuddered to think of him in that frail shell, drifting on and on to his grave, the sky rent with lightning over his head, and the green abysses yawning beneath him. We fell to crying, the three of us, and cried I know not how long.

Meanwhile the storm raged with augmented fury. We were obliged to hold on to the ropes of the tent to prevent it blowing away. The spray from the river leaped several yards up the rocks and clutched at us malignantly. The very island trembled with the concussions of the sea beating upon it, and at times I fancied that it had broken loose from its foundation, and was floating off with us. The breakers, streaked with angry phosphorus, were fearful to look at.

The wind rose higher and higher, cutting long slits in the tent, through which the rain poured incessantly. To complete the sum of our miseries, the night was at hand. It came down suddenly, at last, like a curtain, shutting in Sandpeep Island from all the world.

It was a dirty night, as the sailors say. The darkness was something that could be felt as well as seen,--it pressed down upon one with a cold, clammy touch. Gazing into the hollow blackness, all sorts of imaginable shapes seemed to start forth from vacancy,--brilliant colors, stars, prisms, and dancing lights. What boy, lying awake at night, has not amused or terrified himself by peopling the spaces round his bed with these phenomena of his own eyes?

"I say," whispered Fred Langdon, at length, clutching my hand, "don't you see things--out there--in the dark?"

"Yes, yes,--Binny Wallace's face!"

I added to my own nervousness by making this avowal; though for the last ten minutes I had seen little besides that star-pale face with its angelic hair and brows. First a slim yellow circle, like the nimbus round the moon, took shape and grew sharp against the darkness; then this faded gradually, and there was the Face, wearing the same sad, sweet look it wore when he waved his hand to us across the awful water. This optical illusion kept repeating itself.

"And I, too," said Adams. "I see it every now and then, outside there. What wouldn't I give if it really was poor little Wallace looking in at us! O boys, how shall we dare to go back to the town without him? I've wished a hundred times, since we've been sitting here, that I was in his place, alive or dead!"

We dreaded the approach of morning as much as we longed for it. The morning would tell us all. Was it possible for the Dolphin to outride such a storm? There was a lighthouse on Mackerel Reef, which lay directly in the course the boat had taken, when it disappeared. If the Dolphin had caught on this reef, perhaps Binny Wallace was safe. Perhaps his cries had been heard by the keeper of the light. The man owned a life-boat, and had rescued several people. Who could tell?

Such were the questions we asked ourselves again and again, as we lay in each other's arms waiting for daybreak. What an endless night it was! I have known months that did not seem so long.

Our position was irksome rather than perilous; for the day was certain to bring us relief from the town, where our prolonged absence, together with the storm, had no doubt excited the liveliest alarm for our safety. But the cold, the darkness, and the suspense were hard to bear.

Our soaked jackets had chilled us to the bone. To keep warm, we lay huddled together so closely that we could hear our hearts beat above the tumult of sea and sky.

We used to laugh at Fred Langdon for always carrying in his pocket a small vial of essence of peppermint or sassafras, a few drops of which, sprinkled on a lump of loaf-sugar, he seemed to consider a great luxury. I don't know what would have become of us at this crisis, if it hadn't been for that omnipresent bottle of hot stuff. We poured the stinging liquid over our sugar, which had kept dry in a sardine-box, and warmed ourselves with frequent doses.

After four or five hours the rain ceased, the wind died away to a moan, and the sea--no longer raging like a maniac--sobbed and sobbed with a piteous human voice all along the coast. And well it might, after that night's work. Twelve sail of the Gloucester fishing fleet had gone down with every soul on board, just outside of Whale's-back Light. Think of the wide grief that follows in the wake of one wreck; then think of the despairing women who wrung their hands and wept, the next morning, in the streets of Gloucester, Marblehead, and Newcastle!

Though our strength was nearly spent, we were too cold to sleep. Fred Langdon was the earliest to discover a filmy, luminous streak in the sky, the first glimmering of sunrise.

"Look, it is nearly daybreak!"

While we were following the direction of his finger, a sound of distant oars fell on our ears.

We listened breathlessly, and as the dip of the blades became more audible, we discerned two foggy lights, like will-o'-the-wisps, floating on the river.

Running down to the water's edge, we hailed the boats with all our might. The call was heard, for the oars rested a moment in the row-locks, and then pulled in towards the island.

It was two boats from the town, in the foremost of which we could now make out the figures of Captain Nutter and Binny Wallace's father. We shrunk back on seeing _him_.

"Thank God!" cried Mr. Wallace, fervently, as he leaped from the wherry without waiting for the bow to touch the beach.

But when he saw only three boys standing on the sands, his eye wandered restlessly about in quest of the fourth; then a deadly pallor overspread his features.

Our story was soon told. A solemn silence fell upon the crowd of rough boatmen gathered round, interrupted only by a stifled sob from one poor old man, who stood apart from the rest.

The sea was still running too high for any small boat to venture out; so it was arranged that the wherry should take us back to town, leaving the yawl, with a picked crew, to hug the island until daybreak, and then set forth in search of the Dolphin.

Though it was barely sunrise when we reached town, there were a great many people assembled at the landing, eager for intelligence from missing boats. Two picnic parties had started down river the day before, just previous to the gale, and nothing had been heard of them. It turned out that the pleasure-seekers saw their danger in time, and ran ashore on one of the least exposed islands, where they passed the night. Shortly after our own arrival they appeared off Rivermouth, much to the joy of their friends, in two shattered, dismasted boats.

The excitement over, I was in a forlorn state, physically and mentally. Captain Nutter put me to bed between hot blankets, and sent Kitty Collins for the doctor. I was wandering in my mind, and fancied myself still on Sandpeep Island: now I gave orders to Wallace how to manage the boat, and now I cried because the rain was pouring in on me through the holes in the tent. Towards evening a high fever set in, and it was many days before my grandfather deemed it prudent to tell me that the Dolphin had been found, floating keel upwards, four miles southeast of Mackerel Reef.

Poor little Binny Wallace! How strange it seemed, when I went to school again, to see that empty seat in the fifth row! How gloomy the play-ground was, lacking the sunshine of his gentle, sensitive face! One day a folded sheet slipped from my algebra; it was the last note he ever wrote me. I couldn't read it for the tears.

What a pang shot across my heart the afternoon it was whispered through the town that a body had been washed ashore at Grave Point,--the place where we bathed. We bathed there no more! How well I remember the funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards to see his familiar name on a small headstone in the Old South Burying-Ground!

Poor little Binny Wallace! Always the same to me. The rest of us have grown up into hard, worldly men, fighting the fight of life; but you are forever young, and gentle, and pure; a part of my own childhood that time cannot wither; always a little boy, always poor little Binny Wallace!

_T. B. Aldrich._

A YOUNG MAHOMETAN.

The bedrooms in the old house had tapestry hangings, which were full of Bible history. The subject of the one which chiefly attracted my attention was Hagar and her son Ishmael. I every day admired the beauty of the youth, and pitied the forlorn state of his mother and himself in the wilderness.

At the end of the gallery into which these tapestry rooms opened was one door, which, having often in vain attempted to open, I concluded to be locked. Every day I endeavored to turn the lock. Whether by constantly trying I loosened it, or whether the door was not locked, but only fastened tight by time, I know not; but, to my great joy, as I was one day trying it as usual, it gave way, and I found myself in this so long-desired room.

It proved to be a very large library. If you never spent whole mornings alone in a large library, you cannot conceive the pleasure of taking down books in the constant hope of finding an entertaining one among them; yet, after many days, meeting with nothing but disappointment, it becomes less pleasant. All the books within my reach were folios of the gravest cast. I could understand very little that I read in them, and the old dark print and the length of the lines made my eyes ache.

When I had almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, I perceived a volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. I opened it. It was a charming print; the letters were almost as large as the type of the family Bible. Upon the first page I looked into I saw the name of my favorite Ishmael, whose face I knew so well from the tapestry in the antique bedrooms, and whose history I had often read in the Bible.

I sat myself down to read this book with the greatest eagerness. I shall be quite ashamed to tell you the strange effect it had on me. I scarcely ever heard a word addressed to me from morning till night. If it were not for the old servants saying, "Good morning to you, Miss Margaret," as they passed me in the long passages, I should have been the greater part of the day in as perfect a solitude as Robinson Crusoe.

Many of the leaves in "Mahometanism Explained" were torn out, but enough remained to make me imagine that Ishmael was the true son of Abraham. I read here, that the true descendants of Abraham were known by a light which streamed from the middle of their foreheads, and that Ishmael's father and mother first saw this light streaming from his forehead as he was lying asleep in the cradle.

I was very sorry so many of the leaves were gone, for it was as entertaining as a fairy tale. I used to read the history of Ishmael, and then go and look at him in the tapestry, and then return to his history again. When I had almost learned the history of Ishmael by heart, I read the rest of the book, and then I came to the history of Mahomet, who was there said to be the last descendant of Abraham.

If Ishmael had engaged so much of my thoughts, how much more so must Mahomet! His history was full of nothing but wonders from the beginning to the end. The book said that those who believed all the wonderful stories which were related of Mahomet were called Mahometans, and True Believers; I concluded that I must be a Mahometan, for I believed every word I read.

At length I met with something which I also believed, though I trembled as I read it; this was that, after we are dead, we are to pass over a narrow bridge, which crosses a bottomless gulf. The bridge was described to be no wider than a silken thread; and all who were not Mahometans would slip on one side of this bridge, and drop into the tremendous gulf that had no bottom. I considered myself as a Mahometan, yet I was perfectly giddy whenever I thought of passing over this bridge.

One day, seeing the old lady who lived here totter across the room, a sudden terror seized me, for I thought how she would ever be able to get over the bridge. Then, too, it was that I first recollected that my mother would also be in imminent danger. I imagined she had never heard the name of Mahomet, because, as I foolishly conjectured, this book had been locked up for ages in the library, and was utterly unknown to the rest of the world.

All my desire was now to tell them the discovery I had made; for I thought, when they knew of the existence of "Mahometanism Explained," they would read it, and become Mahometans to insure themselves a safe passage over the silken bridge. But it wanted more courage than I possessed to break the matter to my intended converts. I must acknowledge that I had been reading without leave; and the habit of never speaking, or being spoken to, considerably increased the difficulty.

My anxiety on this subject threw me into a fever. I was so ill that my mother thought it necessary to sleep in the same room with me. In the middle of the night I could not resist the strong desire I felt to tell her what preyed so much on my mind. I awoke her out of a sound sleep, and begged she would be so kind as to be a Mahometan. She was very much alarmed;--she thought I was delirious, and I believe I was; for I tried to explain the reason of my request, but it was in such an incoherent manner that she could not at all comprehend what I was talking about.

The next day a physician was sent for, and he discovered, by several questions that he put to me, that I had read myself into a fever. He gave me medicines, and ordered me to be kept very quiet, and said he hoped in a few days I should be very well; but as it was a new case to him, he never having attended a little Mahometan before, if any lowness continued after he had removed the fever, he would, with my mother's permission, take me home with him to study this extraordinary case at leisure. He added, that he could then hold a consultation with his wife, who was often very useful to him in prescribing remedies for the maladies of his younger patients.

In a few days he fetched me away. His wife was in the carriage with him. Having heard what he said about her prescriptions, I expected, between the doctor and his lady, to undergo a severe course of medicine, especially as I heard him very formally ask her advice as to what was good for a Mahometan fever, the moment after he had handed me into his carriage.

She studied a little while, and then she said, a ride to Harlow Fair would not be amiss. He said he was entirely of her opinion, because it suited him to go there to buy a horse.

During the ride they entered into conversation with me, and in answer to their questions, I was relating to them the solitary manner in which I had passed my time, how I found out the library, and what I had read in that fatal book which had so heated my imagination,--when we arrived at the fair; and Ishmael, Mahomet, and the narrow bridge vanished out of my head in an instant.

Before I went home the good lady explained to me very seriously the error into which I had fallen. I found that, so far from "Mahometanism Explained" being a book concealed only in this library, it was well known to every person of the least information.

The Turks, she told me, were Mahometans. And she said that, if the leaves of my favorite book had not been torn out, I should have read that the author of it did not mean to give the fabulous stories here related as true, but only wrote it as giving a history of what the Turks, who are a very ignorant people, believe concerning Mahomet.

By the good offices of the physician and his lady, I was carried home, at the end of a month, perfectly cured of the error into which I had fallen, and very much ashamed of having believed so many absurdities.

_Mary Lamb._

THE LITTLE PERSIAN.

Among the Persians there is a sect called the Sooffees, and one of the most distinguished saints of this sect was Abdool Kauder.

It is related that, in early childhood, he was smitten with the desire of devoting himself to sacred things, and wished to go to Bagdad to obtain knowledge. His mother gave her consent; and taking out eighty deenars (a denomination of money used in Persia), she told him that, as he had a brother, half of that would be all his inheritance.

She made him promise, solemnly, never to tell a lie, and then bade him farewell, exclaiming, "Go, my son; I give thee to God. We shall not meet again till the day of judgment!"

He went on till he came near to Hamadan, when the company with which he was travelling was plundered by sixty horsemen. One of the robbers asked him what he had got. "Forty deenars," said Abdool Kauder, "are sewed under my garment." The fellow laughed, thinking that he was joking him. "What have you got?" said another. He gave the same answer.

When they were dividing the spoil, he was called to an eminence where their chief stood. "What property have you, my little fellow?" said he. "I have told two of your people already," replied the boy. "I have forty deenars sewed up carefully in my clothes." The chief desired them to be ripped open, and found the money.

"And how came you," said he, with surprise, "to declare so openly what has been so carefully hidden?"

"Because," Abdool Kauder replied, "I will not be false to my mother, whom I have promised that I will never conceal the truth."

"Child!" said the robber, "hast thou such a sense of duty to thy mother, at thy years, and am I insensible, at my age, of the duty I owe to my God? Give me thy hand, innocent boy," he continued, "that I may swear repentance upon it." He did so; and his followers were all alike struck with the scene.

"You have been our leader in guilt," said they to their chief, "be the same in the path of virtue!" and they instantly, at his order, made restitution of the spoil, and vowed repentance on the hand of the boy.

_Juvenile Miscellany._

THE BOYS' HEAVEN.

Harry and Frank had a hearty cry when an ill-natured neighbor poisoned their dog. They dug a grave for their favorite, but were unwilling to put him in it and cover him up with earth.

"I wish there was one of the Chinese petrifying streams near our house," said Frank. "We could lay Jip down in it; and, after a while, he would become a stone image, which we would always keep for a likeness of him."

Harry, who had been reading about the ancient Egyptians, remarked that it was a great pity the art of embalming was lost.

But Frank declared that a mummy was a hideous thing, and that he would rather have the dead dog out of his sight forever, than to make a mummy of him.

"It seems very hard never to see him again," said Harry, with a deep sigh.

"But perhaps Jip has gone to some dog-heaven; and when we go to the boys' heaven, we may happen to see our old pet on the way."

"If he should get sight of us he would follow us," said Frank. "He always liked us better than dogs. O yes, he would follow us to the boys' heaven, of that you may be sure; and I don't think boys would exactly like a heaven without any dogs. Mother, what kind of a place _is_ a boys' heaven?"

His mother, who had just entered the room, knew nothing of what they had been talking about; and, the question being asked suddenly, she hardly knew what to answer.

She smiled, and said, "How can I tell, Frank! You know I never was there."

"That makes no difference," said he. "Folks tell about a great many things they never saw. Nobody ever goes to heaven till they die; but you often read to us about heaven and the angels. Perhaps some people, who died and went there, told others about it in their dreams."

"I cannot answer such questions, dear Harry," replied his mother. "I only know that God is very wise and good, and that he wills we should wait patiently and humbly till our souls grow old enough to understand such great mysteries. Just as it is necessary that you should wait to be much older before you can calculate when the moon will be eclipsed, or when certain stars will go away from our portion of the sky, and when they will come back again. Learned men know when the earth, in its travels through the air, will cast its long dark shadow over the brightness of the moon. They can foretell exactly the hour and the minute when a star will go down below the line which we call the horizon, where the earth and the sky seem to meet; and they know precisely when it will come up again. But if they tried ever so hard, they could never make little boys understand about the rising and the setting of the stars. The wisest of men are very small boys, compared with the angels; therefore the angels know perfectly well many things which they cannot possibly explain to a man till his soul grows and becomes an angel."

"I understand that," said Harry. "For I can read any book; but though Jip was a very bright dog, it was no manner of use to try to teach him the letters. He only winked and gaped when I told him that was A. You see, mother, I was the same as an angel to Jip."

His mother smiled to see how quickly he had caught her meaning.