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The signs of decay in the vivid life of Nature could not touch Bessie with melancholy yet the spring-tides of youth were too strong in her but Mr. Fairfax, glancing hither and thither over the bare, sunless landscape, said, "The winter will soon be upon us, Elizabeth. You must make the best of the few bright days that are remaining: very few and very swift they seem when they are gone."
All vessels that draw not above seventeen feet water, may safely pass over the bar of Charlestown, which at spring-tides will admit ships that draw eighteen feet. This bar lies in thirty-two degrees and forty minutes north latitude, and seventy-eight degrees and forty-five minutes west longitude from London.
The foundation-pit now assumed the appearance of a great platform, and the late tides had been so favourable that it became apparent that the first course, consisting of a few irregular and detached stones for making up certain inequalities in the interior parts of the site of the building, might be laid in the course of the present spring-tides.
I rose, went down to the bath in the rocks, had a joyous physical ablution, and a swim up and down the narrow cleft, from which I emerged as if myself newly born or raised anew, and then wandered about on the downs full of hope and thankfulness, seeking all I could to plant deep in my mind the long-rooted truths of resurrection, that they might be not only ready to blossom in the warmth of the spring-tides to come, but able to send out some leaves and promissory buds even in the wintry time of the soul, when the fogs of pain steam up from the frozen clay soil of the body, and make the monarch-will totter dizzily upon his throne, to comfort the eyes of the bewildered king, reminding him that the King of kings hath conquered Death and the Grave.
This finished the solid part of the building, and terminated the height of the outward casing of granite, which is thirty-one feet six inches above the rock or site of the foundation-stone, and about seventeen feet above high-water of spring-tides.
True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze.
The dismay that is upon us all, in the business of the kingdom and Navy at this day, is not to be expressed otherwise than by the condition the citizens were in when the City was on fire, nobody knowing which way to turn themselves, while every thing concurred to greaten the fire; as here the easterly gale and spring-tides for coming up both rivers, and enabling them to break the chaine.
Still, we had very little of our cargo left, and every day saw it decrease. The spring-tides were also coming on, when there was the greatest depth of water on the bar, and we could the most easily make our escape without a pilot. As we lay at our anchors off Salee, we had a view from the mast-head of the open sea, over a point of land which ran out below the town.
Three summers were spent in sinking the pump-shaft, which had every tide to be emptied of water. A frame of boards, raised to a sufficient height above the spring-tides, and rendered water-tight by pitch and oakum, was placed above the mouth of the shaft. Its sides were supported by stout props in an inclined direction.
The width of the river is in general from about three-quarters to half a mile, and its depth from fifteen to seven fathoms; but on the bar at low-water spring-tides there are only fifteen feet, and several shoals near its mouth.
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