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Updated: May 22, 2025
Some of the firemen had run down to the bridge when they saw that the skiff was not going to be of any use, and one of them had got out of the window of the bridge onto the middle pier, with a long pole in his hand. It had an iron hook at the end, and it was the kind of pole that the men used to catch drift-wood with and drag it ashore.
His fire was just flickering around its last embers, and if he wished to have a pleasant light to cheer the solitude and the darkness of his evening hours, it would be necessary to prepare a supply of fuel. To this he attended at once, and brought up several armfuls of drift-wood from the beach.
The long rambles inland, also, and the evenings on the floor amid her specimens, down before the drift-wood fire. She forgot her surroundings finally, so interested was she; and once the professor, glancing up, smiled a little at sight of the bent head and eager, intent face. He watched her, unperceived, for some seconds, then, with a nod of satisfaction, returned to his own labors.
"But she did manage it, and by Thursday night the party was actually assembled at 'The Breakers. There was a sou'easter on that night, but the drift-wood burned stoutly in the wide chimney-piece, with now and then a cheerful sputter as a few stray drops sought to immolate themselves in the green and purple flames.
Welcome, ye great winged strangers, whose very names are unknown! This hearth is comprehensive in its hospitalities; it will accept from you either its fuel or its guests; your mariners may warm themselves beside it, or your scattered timbers may warm me. Strange instincts might be supposed to thrill and shudder in the ribs of ships that sail toward the beacon of a drift-wood fire.
One of their number describes the great river as almost half a league wide, deep, rapid, and constantly rolling down trees and drift-wood on its turbid current. The Spaniards crossed over at a point above the mouth of the Arkansas. They advanced westward, but found no treasures, nothing indeed but hardships, and an Indian enemy, furious, writes one of their officers, "as mad dogs."
I know not how else we can meet the elements by a defiance so magnificent as that from this open hearth; and in burning drift-wood, especially, we turn against the enemy his own ammunition. For on these fragments three elements have already done their work. Water racked and strained the hapless ships, air hunted them, and they were thrown at last upon earth, the sternest of all.
But it is good, at the eve of such a day, to feel and know that there are men and women in the world. That feeling and that knowledge are mine, at this moment; for, on the shore, far below me, the fishing- party have landed from their skiff, and are cooking their scaly prey by a fire of drift-wood, kindled in the angle of two rude rocks. The three visionary girls are likewise there.
The wicked hev it their way fur a while, an' then they don't. They don't ever seem able to finish up their work. Sometimes I think the right is jest like a river flowin' on in its nateral channel, an' boun' to git to the sea after a while, no matter what happens. The wrong is all them dams, an' san' bars an' snags, and brush an' drift-wood that people an' chance pile up in the way.
About noon we struggled past Point Masalla, our "Diamond Rock," a reef ending in a triangular block, towering abruptly, and showing by drift-wood a flood-line now twelve feet high. There are several of these "bench-marks;" and the people declare that after every few years an unusual freshet takes place. Here the current impinges directly upon the rocks, making a strong eddy.
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