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: of that too terrible and plaintive thing which rested in this Western home. There it lay—a ruin—a Wrong, unfathomable in its depths, boundless in its degree, more bleak and blighting than Arctic winter, and foul as the strategy of hissing hell. Upon this ruin,—this inestimable wrong, our narrative is founded, with the humble and sincere hope that it may prove an outcry, reaching, by reason of its simple, plaintive truth, into the secret chambers of the soul of every manly reader, and echoing thence throughout the dominions of men,—for there are laws more brittle to be broken than icicles. CHAPTER II. A Letter, dated at Ranche Rapid, directed to Rev. St. John Hope, Creswood Post-office, Maryland, and signed " Cassel Pontiac Rapid," left Waco Village by mail about two weeks after the events of our opening chapter. Young Rapid had signed his full name, not that he considered it either grand or imposing, but that there might be no question as to the identity of the writer; for the letter was an important one, and was intended to lead to important and specific results. The Rev. St. John Hope, who was an old friend of the youth's father, was requested to direct his reply to the City of New Orleans. In advance of this letter we must now go to Creswood, and, with the wand of the historian, call back from the past a few essential years. Gale Island, which, by the fury of storms, has been reduced to an insignificant pile of rocks, was, at the date which we now recall, a fractional though detached portion of the Atlantic shore'of Maryland. In area it measured about ten acres. It was not set in the sea as an island proper, but was on a line with the low beach, which, at either hand, was called respectively " Larboard" and " Starboard" Strand, the island being the central and deter...