"
"Old Probabilities! The house he lives in!"
"Life-boats!"
Visions of the mysterious old prophet who utters his oracles through
the morning paper, of wrecks and storms, and of heroic men carrying
lines through the night to sinking ships, filled our brains.
Townspeople out for their summer holiday have keen appetites for the
romantic and extraordinary, and manufacture them (as sugar from beets)
out of the scantiest materials. We turned our backs on the fisherman
and his squid-line. The signal station and the hull of the lost vessel
were only a shed and timber to him. How can any man be alive to the
significance of a wreck and fluttering flag which he sees twenty times
a day? Noah, no doubt, after a year in the ark, came to look upon it
as so much gopher-wood, and appreciated it as a good job of joinery
rather than a divine symbol.
We believe, however, that our readers will find in the wrecked Creole
and the wooden shed, and the practical facts concerning them, matter
suggestive enough to hold them a little space. They fill a yet
unwritten page in the history of our government, and of great and
admirable work done by it, of which the nation at large has been
given but partial knowledge.
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