Rockhaven
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV WHEBE THE SEA-GULLS COME Like a pair of Titanic spectacles joined with a bridge of granite, the two halves of Eockhaven faced the Atlantic billows, as grim and defiant as when Leif Ericson's crew of fearless Norsemen sailed into its beautiful harbor. With a coast line of bold cliffs, indented by occasional fissures and crested with ' stunted spruce, the interior, sloping toward the centre, hears only the whisper of the ocean winds. Rockhaven has a history, and it is one filled with the pathos of poverty, from that day, long ago, when Captain Carver first sailed into its land-locked harbor to split, salt, and dry his sloop load of cod on the sunny slope of a granite ledge, until now, when two straggling villages of tiny houses, interspersed with racks for drying cod, a few untidy fishing smacks t
...ied up at its small wharves, and a little- steamboat that daily journeys back and forth to the main land, thirty miles distant, entitles it to be called inhabited. In that history also is incorporated manyghastly tales of shipwreck on its forbidding and wave-beaten shores, of long winters when its ledges and ravines were buried beneath a pall of snow, its little fleet of fishermen storm-stayed in the harbor, and food and fuel scarce. It also has its romantic tales of love and waiting to end in despair, when some fisher boy sailed away and never came back; and one that had a tragic ending, when a fond and foolish maiden ended years of waiting by hanging herself in the old tide milL And, too, it has had its religious revival, when a wave of Bible reading and conversion swept over its poorly fed people, to be followed by a split in its one Baptist church on the merits and truths of close communion or its opposite, to end in the formation of another. It also had its mo...
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