"Yonder go the shades of Ossian's heroes," said Mary Defourchet to her companion, pointing through the darkening air.
They were driving carefully in an old-fashioned gig, in one of the lulls of the storm, along the edge of a pine wood, early in the afternoon. The old Doctor,—for it was MacAulay, (Dennis,) from over in Monmouth County, she was with,—the old man did not answer, having enough to do to guide his mare, the sleet drove so in his eyes. Besides, he was gruffer than usual this afternoon, looking with the trained eyes of an old water-dog out to the yellow line of the sea to the north. Miss Defourchet pulled the oil-skin cloth closer about her knees, and held her tongue; she relished the excitement of this fierce fighting the wind, though; it suited the nervous tension which her mind had undergone lately.
It was a queer, lonesome country, the lee coast,—never so solitary as now, perhaps; older than the rest of the world, she fancied,—so many of Nature's voices, both of bird and vegetable, had been entirely lost out of it: no wonder it had grown unfruitful, and older and dumber and sad, listening for ages to the unremorseful, cruel cries of the sea; these dead bodies, too, washed up every year on its beaches, must haunt it, though it was not guilty. She began to say something of this to Doctor Dennis, tired of being silent.
"Your country seems to me always to shut itself out from the world," she said; "from the time I enter that desolate region on its border of dwarf oaks and gloomy fires of the charcoal-burners, I think of the old leper and his cry of 'Unclean! unclean!'"
MacAulay glances anxiously at her, trying to keep pace with her meaning.
"It's a lonesome place enough," he said, slowly. "There be but the two or three farm-keepers; and the places go from father to son, father to son. The linen and carpet-mats in that house you're in now come down from the times before Washington. Stay-at-home, quiet people,—only the men that follow the water, in each generation. There be but little to be made from these flats of white sand. Yes, quiet enough: the beasts of prey aren't scaret out of these pine forests yet, I heard the cry of a panther the other night only, coming from Tom's River: close by the road it was: sharp and sorrowful, like a lost child.—As for ghosts," he continued, after a thoughtful pause, "I don't know any that would have reason for walking, without it was Captain Kidd. His treasure's buried along-shore here."
"Ay?" said Mary, looking up shrewdly into his face.
"Yes," he answered, shaking his head slowly, and measuring his whip with one eye. "Along here, many's the Spanish half-dollar I've picked up myself among the kelp. They do say they're from a galleon that went ashore come next August thirty years ago, but I don't know that."
"And the people in the hamlet?" questioned Mary, nodding to a group of scattered, low-roofed houses.
"Clam-fishers, the maist o' them. There be quite a many wrackers, but they live farther on, towards Barnegat. But a wrack draws them, like buzzards to a carcass."