At noon or later, after the ruin of Last Island, a gentleman of a name renowned in South-western story found himself clinging to a bush in the wild waters, lashed by the long whips of branches, half dead with fatigue and fear. For a time the hurly-burly blinded and hid everything, and the long roll rocked and tore at him in desperate endeavor to wrench loose his bleeding fingers. The impulse of the wind and storm at such a time is as of a solid body, and there is a look of solidity in the very appearance of the magnificent force. But as it abated he thought he heard a faint cry, and looking around he saw a poor girl in the ribbons of her night-dress clinging to a branch, and slipping from her feeble hold. Tired as he was, and wild and dangerous as the attempt might be, he did not dare to leave her to perish. Choosing his time in a lull, he struck out to the bush, and reached it just as her ebbing strength gave way. He took her in his sturdy arms, and, clinging with tooth and nail, stayed them both to their strange anchorage. Faint, half conscious, disrobed as she was, in the sweet, delicate features, the curve of the lip, and the raven tresses clothed in seaweed, he recognized the Creole belle of last night's hop. He cheered and encouraged her, pointing out that the storm was abating, had abated. It could not be long until search-boats came, and while he had strength to live she should share it. It proved true. Generous and hardy fishers and ships had come at once to the scene of disaster, and were busy picking up the few spared by wind and wave. They found the two clinging together and to that slight bush, and took them off, wrapping them in ready, rough fishermen's coats. The reader can see the end of that story. A meeting so appointed had its predestined end in a love-match. So we leave it and them: the rest of their lives belongs to them, not to us.
The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his wife. For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together. When I think of the husband's manly care in thus abiding by the wife, I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only valued his life and hers at a few dollars—not enough to compensate the traveler for the loss incurred as demurrage to the fishermen.
Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the cataclysm of that dreadful night—bones which now waste to whiteness on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the under-sea.
WILL WALLACE HARNEY.
Footnote 1: [(return)] The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate chromoscope. I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the former surpassing the idealization of the latter.
Footnote 2: [(return)] By recent provision the Chinese are allowed to buy foreign vessels.
POSEY'S NUGGET.
When the California "gold fever" broke out in the spring of 1849, Doctor Hanchett was living at Clarksville in Southern Indiana. Doctor Hanchett, it should be stated, had received his professional title not by the favor of any medical college or other learned institution, but through the simpler and less formal method that obtains among the free and generous people amongst whom his lines were cast. The process may be explained in a few words. In the fall of 1846 a recruiting station was established at Vicksburg to enlist volunteers for the war with Mexico, and Hanchett, at that time a resident of Vicksburg, and laboring in a profession—the saltatorial, to wit—a shade less illustrious than that to which he was so soon to attain, was the first man in the city to enlist. This momentous circumstance procured for him not only the prompt recognition of a patriotic press, which blazoned his name abroad with so many eccentricities of spelling that he came near losing his identity, but also gave him a claim in courtesy to such a position in the organization of his company, within the grasp of the mere high private, as he might select. After due deliberation he chose that of company commissary—an office unknown, I think, to the United States Army Regulations, but none the less familiar to our volunteer service. To this post he was promptly appointed by his captain; and, thus placed in the line of promotion, he rose rapidly till he attained the rank of hospital steward. The thing was done. Hanchett was Doctor Hanchett from that day, and the title was very much the larger part of the man ever after. How he had lived for forty years or more without it is still a mystery.
When the war was over, Doctor Hanchett stranded upon the northern bank of the Ohio, in the State of Indiana. As a returning brave he was, naturally, quite warmly received. As a veteran not unwilling to recount his adventures by flood and field, he speedily became famous as the hero of many deeds of valor and of blood. He had been assistant surgeon of his regiment, it appeared, but nevertheless had fought in the ranks in every important engagement of the war from Monterey to Churubusco, and the number of men who had fallen by his own hand from first to last he could not undertake to estimate. Though traces of a somewhat lively imagination might be detected in most of the doctor's stories, there is really no good reason to doubt that he spoke the simple truth when he averred that with his red right hand he had mowed down men like grass, for he actually retained the position of hospital steward throughout the whole term of his service.