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The moonbeams scintillated for a moment on its shell, as it hesitated on the edge, and then the turtle commenced a clumsy scramble up the beach, lifting itself along in a laborious manner. In ten minutes it had reached the loose sand above tide-water, and kept its course toward us until within thirty feet, when it began to excavate its nest.

The messenger had tried to dissuade him; he had reminded him there were no road-houses, and that the traces left by my party must have been wiped out by the winter snows. But Weatherbee argued that the new route would shorten the distance to open tide-water hundreds of miles; that his nearest neighbors were in that direction, fifty miles to the south; and they would let him have dogs.

Beyond the tide-water, men for the most part earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, lived the life and esteemed the virtues of a primitive society, and braced their minds with the tonic of Calvin's theology a tonic somewhat tempered in these late enlightened days by a more humane philosophy and the friendly emotionalism of simple folk living close to nature.

We hear a great deal nowadays of the benefits which are to come to Alaska from the railroad which the United States is expected to build from tide-water to the Yukon, and the clamorous voices of the journalist and the professional promoter and politician, which seem the only voices which ever reach the ear of government, are insistent that this is the one great thing that will bring prosperity to the country.

Throttling to quarter-speed they skirted the south shore of the island and nosed their way along the coast. At length the girl suggested a halt. "We ought to be nearly up to the Hell-Hole Isthmus by now," she whispered. "On the beach along here there should be a lot of tide-water caves if we're where I think. Around the next point is the goose-neck. We'd better go ashore and have a look.

Later this was remedied, by deepening the channel and increasing the number of vessels suitable to its navigation. Corpus Christi is near the head of the bay of the same name, formed by the entrance of the Nueces River into tide-water, and is on the west bank of that bay.

Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large influx of people drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were brought to America the mass of convict servants, redemptioners, and the like, who formed such an excessively undesirable substratum to the otherwise excellent population of the tide-water regions in Virginia and the Carolinas.

June came to tide-water Virginia with long, warm days and with the odor of many roses. Day by day the cloudless sunshine visited the land: night by night the large pale stars looked into its waters. It was a slumberous land, of many creeks and rivers that were wide, slow, and deep, of tobacco fields and lofty, solemn forests, of vague marshes, of white mists, of a haze of heat far and near.

Whereas, by a law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, enacted in the year 1785, the Legislature thereof was pleased, as an evidence of its approbation of the services I had rendered the public during the Revolution, and partly, I believe, in consideration of my having suggested the vast advantages which the community would derive from the extension of its inland navigation under legislative patronage, to present me with one hundred shares, of one hundred dollars each, in the incorporated Company, established for the purpose of extending the navigation of James River from the tide-water to the mountains; and also with fifty shares, of £100 sterling each, in the corporation of another Company, likewise established for the similar purpose of opening the navigation of the River Potomac from the tide-water to Fort Cumberland; the acceptance of which, although the offer was highly honorable and grateful to my feelings, was refused, as inconsistent with a principle which I had adopted, and had never departed from, viz., not to receive pecuniary compensation for any services I could render my country in its arduous struggle with Great Britain for its rights, and because I had evaded similar propositions from other States in the Union; adding to this refusal, however, an intimation that, if it should be the pleasure of the Legislature to permit me to appropriate the said shares to public uses, I would receive them on those terms with due sensibility; and this it having consented to, in flattering terms, as will appear by a subsequent law, and sundry resolutions, in the most ample and honorable manner; I proceed after this recital, for the more correct understanding of the case, to declare; that, as it has always been a source of serious regret with me, to see the youth of these United States sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education, often before their minds were formed, or they had imbibed any adequate ideas of the happiness of their own; contracting too frequently, not only habits of dissipation and extravagance, but principles unfriendly to republican government, and to the true and genuine liberties of mankind, which thereafter are rarely overcome; for these reasons it has been my ardent wish to see a plan devised, on a liberal scale, which would have a tendency to spread systematic ideas through all parts of this rising empire, thereby to do away local attachments and State prejudices, as far as the nature of things would, or indeed ought to admit, from our national councils.

"But, gentlemen, we honor our guest as the stanch, undeviating defender of these principles, of our principles, of American principles. Has he ever deserted them? Has he ever been known to waver? Gentlemen, there are some men, some, too, who would wish to direct public opinion, who are like the buoys upon tide-water. They float up and down as the current sets this way or that.