In one of the most beautiful of the many romantic spots on the rugged coast of Eastern Maine lived Captain Ben Rhines. The country was just emerging from the terrible struggle of the revolution, and the eastern part of the state had settled very slowly. The older portion of the inhabitants, now living in frame houses, had been born and passed their childhood in log camps.

Captain Rhines’s house stood at the head of a little cove, on the western side of a large bay, formed by a sweep in the main shore on the one side, and a point on the other, called (from the name of its owner, Isaac Murch) “Uncle Isaac’s Point.”

A small stream, that carried a saw and grist mill, found an outlet at the head of it, while the milldam served the inhabitants for a bridge. A number of islands were scattered over the surface of the bay, some of them containing hundreds of acres; others, a mere patch of rock and turf, fringed with the white foam of the breakers.

At a distance of six miles, broad off at sea, in a north-westerly direction, lay an island, called Elm Island, deriving its name from the great numbers of that tree which grew on its southern end.

As we shall have a great deal to do with this island, it is necessary to be particular in the description of it. It was about three miles in length, rocks and all, by two in width, running north-east and south-west, and parallel to the main land. From the eastern side, Captain Rhines’s house and the whole extent of the bay, and Uncle Isaac’s Point, were visible. Nature seemed to have lavished her skill upon this secluded spot.

The island was formed by two ridges of rock forming the line of the shore, the intervening valley dividing the island nearly in the middle. These ridges sloped gradually, on their inner sides, into fertile swales of deep, strong soil. The shores were perpendicular, dropping plump down into the ocean, being in some places forty feet above the level of the water. They were rent and seamed by the frost and waves; and, in the crevices of the rocks, the spruce and birch trees thrust their roots, and, clinging to the face of the cliff, struggled for life with waves and tempests.

The island would have been well nigh inaccessible, had not nature provided on the south-western end a most remarkable harbor. The line of perpendicular cliffs on the north-west ran the whole length of the island, against which, even in calm weather, the ground-swell of the ocean eternally beat. The westerly ridge, which was covered with soil of a moderate depth, gradually sloped as it approached the south-western end, till it terminated in a broad space occupying the whole width between the outer cliffs, and gradually sloping to the water’s edge. This portion of the island was bare of wood, and covered with green grass. The eastern ridge terminated in a long, broad point, covered with a growth of spruce trees, so dense that not a breath of wind could get through them, and, curving around, formed a beautiful cove, whose precipitous sides broke off the easterly sea and gales.

Into the head of this cove poured a brook, which, like a little boy, had a very small beginning. It came out from beneath the roots of two yellow birch trees that grew side by side in a little stream not more than two inches deep. As it ran on, it was joined by two other springs, that came out from the westerly ridge. The waters of these springs, together with the rains which slowly filtered through the forest, made quite a brook, which was never dry in the hottest weather.

At certain periods of the year the frost-fish and the smelts came up from the sea into the mouth of this brook. The cove, also, was full of flounders and minnows, eels and lobsters, and abounded in clams. The fish attracted the fish-hawks and herons, who filled the woods with their notes. Sometimes there would be ten blue herons’ nests on one great beech. The fish-hawks attracted the eagles, who obtained their principal living by robbing the fish-hawks. The wild geese, coots, whistlers, brants, and sea-ducks also came there to drink. This was not the natural habitat of the large blue heron, their food not being found there to any great extent, as the shores were too bold, and the waters too deep; their favorite feeding grounds are the broad shallow coves, where they can wade into the water with their long legs, and catch little fish as they come up on the flood tide; but they prefer to go after their food, rather than abandon this secluded spot, where they are secure from all enemies, and where the tall trees afforded these shy birds such advantages for building their nests. As for the fish-hawks, who dive and take their food from the water, it was just the place for them.

There was also on the eastern side of the western ridge a swamp, a most solitary place, so thickly timbered with enormous hemlocks and firs, mixed with white cedar, that it was almost as dark as twilight at noonday. Here dwelt an innumerable multitude of herons, where they had bred undisturbed for ages. Much smaller than the great blue heron, they built their nests in the low firs and cedars; and as they fed upon frogs, grasshoppers, mice, tadpoles, and minnows, they were not obliged to leave the island for their food: they were perfectly at home and happy.

They belonged to that species called, by naturalists, ardea nycticorax. The inhabitants called them squawks and flying foxes, from the noise they made. Like all the heron tribe, they are extremely quick of hearing, and feed mostly in the morning and evening twilight, half asleep through the day among the branches of the firs, standing on one leg. They make shallow nests of sticks, and lay three or four green eggs. You may walk through their haunts: all is still as death, apparently not a heron on the island, while thousands of them are right over your head, and all around you, listening to every step you take, the slightest noise of which they will hear, when you do not notice it yourself. Crack goes a dry stick under your foot; you catch your toe under a spruce root, and tumble down; instantly the intense stillness of the woods is broken by a flapping of wings and rustling of branches, succeeded by quaw, quaw, squawk, squawk, producing a chorus almost deafening. The sound they emit, which is a union of growl, bark, and scream, comes from their throat with such suddenness, breaking upon the deep silence of the woods, like the whirr of the partridge, that it will make you jump, though you are prepared for it and accustomed to it. Then you will see them, after flying to a safe distance, light on the tips of the fir limbs, holding themselves up with their wings on the bending branch, like a bobolink on a spear of herds-grass, from which they will in an instant crawl down into the middle of the tree, sitting close to the trunk, where it is impossible to see them. You must therefore shoot them when they are on the wing, or at the moment they light.

They will bear a great deal of killing, and even make believe dead. I knew a boy once who shot four squawks, and after beating them with an iron ramrod, left them tied up in his pocket-handkerchief at the foot of a tree while he was clambering up after eggs: when he came down, two of them had crawled out of the handkerchief and run away. They will show fight, too, when they are wounded, bite and thrust with their bill, and scratch terribly with their claws. As if to compensate for the horrible noise they make, the full-grown male is a very handsome bird. The top of the head and back are green, the eyes a bright, flashing red, and just above them a little patch of pure white. The bill is black, the wings are light blue, the back part and sides of the neck lilac, shading on the front and breast to a cream color, and the legs yellow. From the back part of the head depend three feathers, white as snow and extremely delicate, rolled together, and as long as the neck.

The mouth of the little brook of which we have spoken was a very busy place when the fish-hawks were fishing, or carrying sticks to build their nests, and screaming with all their might, the herons fishing for minnows, squawks catching frogs, the wild geese making their peculiar noise, the sea-fowl diving, the ducks quacking, and the fish jumping from the water in schools. It shows how God provides for all his creatures, for though there are thousands of these islands scattered along the coast of Maine, on the smallest of them, and some that are mere rocks, you will find springs of living water.

On this island was a spring, that whenever the tide was in was six feet under water; but when the tide ebbed, there was the spring bubbling up in the white sand, as good fresh water as was ever drank.

Old Skipper Brown said he knew the time when it was a rod up the bank; that when he used to go fishing with his father, he had filled many a jug with water out of it; but the frost and the sea had undermined the bank and washed it away, till the tide came to flow over it.

There is another thing in relation to this little harbor, of great importance; for though the high rocks and the thick wood sheltered the little cove from all but the south and south-west winds, yet it would have been (at any rate the mouth of it) very much exposed to the whole sweep of the Atlantic waves in southerly gales; and though the cove was so winding that a vessel in the head of it could not be hurt by the sea, yet it would have been very hard going in, and impossible to get out in bad weather, had it not been for a provision of nature, of which I shall now speak, consisting of some ragged and outlying rocks.

One of these was called the White Bull, deriving its name from the peculiar hoarse roar which the sea made as it broke upon it, and also the white cliffs of which it was composed. It was a long granite ledge, perpendicular on the inside, and far above the reach of the highest waves. On the seaward side it ran off into irregular broken reefs, covered with kelp, the home of the rock cod and lobster, and the favorite resort of all the diving sea-fowl, who fed on the weeds growing on the bottom.

In the centre of these reefs was a large cove. Between this rock and the eastern point of the island was another, of similar shape, but smaller dimensions, called the Little Bull: they were connected by a reef running beneath the water, against which the sea broke, in storms, with great fury; and even in calm weather, from the ground swell of the ocean, it was white with the foaming breakers.

On the western side was a long, high, narrow island, called, from its shape, the “Junk of Pork,” with deep water all around it, and covered with grass. The two ends of this island lapped by the western point of the White Bull and the western point of the main island, thus presenting a complete barrier against the sea. The whole space between the main land and these outlying rocks and islands was a beautiful harbor, the bottom of which was clay, and sand on top, thus affording an excellent hold to anchors.

There were two passages to go in and out, according as the wind might happen to be, with deep water close to the rocks. This harbor was a favorite resort of the fishermen, who came here to dig clams in the cove, and catch menhaden and herring for bait; they also stopped here in the afternoons to get water, and make a fire on the rocks, and take a cup of tea, before they went out to fish all night for hake; they also resorted to it in the morning to dress their fish and make a chowder, and lie under the shadow of the trees and sleep all the afternoon, that they might be ready to go out the next night.

The bottom of the cove on the White Bull was of granite, sloping gradually into deep water, and smooth as ice. Beneath this formation of granite was a blue rock of much softer texture than granite. The sea, in great storms, rolled the fragments of blue stone back and forth on this granite floor, and wore away and rounded the corners, making them of the shape of those you see in the pavements of the cities. The action of these stones for hundreds of years, on this granite floor, had worn holes in it as big as the mouth of a well, and two or three feet in depth. Sometimes a great square rock would get in one of them, too big for the summer winds to fling out, and the sea would roll it round in the hole all summer, wear the corners off, and then the December gales would wash it out. Among the quartz sand in the bottom of this cove you could pick up crystals that had been ground out of the rocks, from an eighth of an inch to an inch in diameter.

It was a glorious sight to behold, and one never to be forgotten, either in this world or the next, when the waves, which had been growing beneath the winter’s gale the whole breadth of the Atlantic, came thundering in on these ragged rocks, breaking thirty feet high, pouring through the gaps between them, white foam on their summits and deep green beneath, and when a gleam of sunshine, breaking from a ragged cloud, flashed along their edges, displaying for a moment all the colors of the rainbow. But when in the outer cove of the White Bull the great wave came up, a quarter of a mile in length, bearing before it the pebbles, some weighing three hundred pounds, others not larger than a sparrow’s egg, all alive and moving in the surf, and rolling over each other on the smooth granite bottom, how solemn to listen to that awful roar, like the voice of Almighty God!

Amid all this commotion, the little harbor, protected by its granite ramparts, was tranquil as a summer’s lake. The surface of it was indeed flecked with the froth of the breakers that drifted in little bunches through the gaps of the rocks, and there was a slight movement caused by the last pulsation of some dying wave; but that was all, and way up in the cove there was no motion whatever.

It may be interesting as well as instructive, having the old traditions of the island to guide us, to consider the manner in which this picturesque and most useful harbor was formed.

Captain Rhines said his father told him, that when he was a boy (nearly seventy years before the date of our tale) these outer rocks were all connected with the main island. Between the eastern end of the island and the Little Bull, and between the Little Bull and the White Bull, was a strip of clay loam, covered with a growth of fir, hemlock, and spruce; and between the White Bull and the Junk of Pork, and the western point of the main island, were sand-spits mixed with stones, and salt grass growing on them. What is now the harbor was then a swamp, into which the brook and all the rain-water from the higher portions of the island drained. In the middle of this swamp was a pond, margined with alder bushes, cat-tail flags, and rotten logs. In high courses of tides the salt water came into it, and this brackish water bred myriads of mosquitos.

When people went on there, they had to pick a smooth time, and go right on the top of the tide, and haul their boat over a sand-spit into the swamp. It was impossible to land, or get away from there, when it was rough. Captain Rhines went on there once a gunning, in December, and had to stay a week. Having no axe to build a camp, he turned his boat bottom up to sleep under, and getting fire with his gun, cooked and ate sea-fowl; but he got awful tired of them.

He said, moreover, that the land on the outside kept caving off every spring when the frost came out, and falling into the sea, till there was only a little strip of land, with three old hemlocks upon it, left; and he used to pity them as they stood there shivering in the gale, their great roots sticking out drying in the wind, and dripping with salt spray, for he knew they were doomed, and must go.

At length there came a dreadful high tide and south-east gale; the sea broke in and swept the whole soil off, and in the course of ten years turned it into a clam bed. It was the greatest place to get clams, for a clam chowder, that ever was in the world. He said that it kept gradually scouring out and deepening, till it became a first-rate harbor.

This island was owned by a merchant of Boston, in whose employ Captain Rhines had sailed for many years, who gave him liberty to pasture it with sheep, as a recompense for taking care of and preventing squatters from plundering it of spars and timber. As sheep are very fond of sea-weed and kelp, they would make a very good living on a place like this island, where most of our domestic animals would find pretty hard fare.

An island like this of which I have spoken is a very pretty spot to describe or visit; but I should like to ask my young readers if they think they could be happy in such a place, especially after they have enumerated with me the things, those we suppose to be living there would be deprived of, and which they often imagine they could not live without.

There was not a road on the island, nor a side-walk, only foot-paths; not a horse, a store, church, school-house, post-office, museum, or toy-shop; not a piano, nor any kind of musical instrument, except the grand diapason of the breakers; no circus, caravan, soldiers, nor fireworks; no confectionery nor ice-creams.

The island stood alone in the ocean; and though you could land at any time when you could get there, yet there were weeks together in winter, when, in case of sickness or death, not a boat could live to cross from the main land; they were completely shut out from all the rest of the world. But you say, perhaps, these people must have been very poor.

O, not at all. If you mean, by being poor, that they had not much money, or horses, or carriages, or rich dresses, and servants to wait on them, why, then they were poor; but if you mean by the term poor, such poverty as you see in the cities or in the large country towns, where you may see aged women in rags begging from door to door; children with their little bare feet as red as the pigeons’ with the cold, picking the little bits of coal out of the ashes that are thrown out of the stores and houses; gathering pieces of hoops and chips around the wharves and warehouses to carry home to burn; with the tears running down their little cheeks, crying, “Please give me a cent to buy some bread,”—O, there was no such poverty as that there: they never knew what it was to want good wholesome food, and good coarse warm clothing to keep out the frost and snow.

“But how did they get it, if they had not much money to buy it?”

“Get it? Why, they worked for it; and if any one had called these island people beggars, they would have broken his head, or flung him overboard.”

You may think as you like, my young friends; but people did live on this island, and were happy as the days are long, though they had their trials and “head flaws,” as we all must.