I SUPPOSE that there are very few people who read this story that have not heard of the great hurricane of 1814, for I take it that very few will read what I have written who are not in some way related or connected with Tom Granger, and all such have heard him tell of it again and again. Nevertheless, as I have ink and paper before me, and as the itch of writing is upon me, I will tell it once more for the benefit of those who come hereafter, and who have not heard of it from Tom’s own mouth.

This hurricane reached over a zone stretching in breadth from Florida to the Greater Antilles. It was felt more heavily in the northern part than anywhere else; so that Tom and Jack passed through the worst of it. One hundred and eight vessels were wrecked in the harbors and on the coast of this region during the progress of the hurricane, and the death-list was known to reach as high as one hundred and six. The crops suffered severely, and over seven hundred houses were destroyed.

A few years ago, while I was spending a couple of weeks at Atlantic City with my wife and two of my grandchildren, I met a Mr. Fitzgerald. He was a lad living at Nassau at the time of this hurricane, and he not only remembered it well, but his father, who was a gentleman much interested in scientific matters, had kept careful data and memoranda relating to it.

Mr. Fitzgerald was a very bright and intelligent old gentleman at the time that I met him, and I was much interested in talking the matter over with him, and comparing notes regarding it. The storm was severe enough with Tom and Jack, but it must have been terrible indeed in a place where there were so many lives to be lost and so much property to be destroyed as in Nassau. He told me that the storm began with them about ten o’clock in the night of the fourth of March, and blew with great violence until half-past ten o’clock in the morning of the fifth. The barometer at that time stood at 27.06 inches, which was the lowest that his father had ever seen it. From that time the storm subsided, and the torrents of rain began to cease, though the wind continued to blow with violence until four o’clock in the afternoon. But all the great loss of life and property happened in the space of twelve hours, and while the hurricane was at its height.

The storm began at an earlier hour with Jack and Tom than it did at Nassau, according to Mr. Fitzgerald’s account of it. I know, however, that it came on the fourth of March, because that is the day before Tom’s birthday, which comes on the fifth; therefore I am accurate in regard to my dates, even if Mr. Fitzgerald had not corroborated the account that I have always given of it.

It was a peculiarly sultry day, especially for that time of the year. Tom and Jack were fishing in the morning, and, though they were sitting still, the sweat kept running from Tom’s face in streams, as though he was engaged in doing a hard piece of work. All morning there was a dead stillness and a leaden heaviness in the air, and it seemed as though it was a labor even to breathe. The sea gulls kept flying around the reef in a troubled way, clamoring as they flew, and seeming to be restless and uneasy at the oppressive stillness. The sky in the morning was of a dull copperish color, though not a cloud was to be seen, but, as the day wore along, a misty haze spread above them, through which the sun shone red and dull, as it does in the morning and evening, when it is near to the horizon. Once Jack said:

“Tom, there’s something going to happen. I never felt anything like this in all my life before; and did you ever see the sea gulls behaving as they are doing now? Mark my words, Tom, there’s something going to come of all this before the day’s over.”

Tom agreed with him in his forebodings, for the oppression that he was laboring under made him feel singularly apprehensive and uneasy in his mind. In the afternoon they left their fishing and went back to their hut, where they stretched themselves out in the shade, panting for breath, for it seemed as though a hot blanket had been spread above them. The tame sea gull sat under the lee of the boat, all hunched up together. Every now and then it would look restlessly about, uttering a low, whimpering note as it did so.

About four o’clock in the afternoon, as near as Tom could judge, a strong puff of wind blew suddenly from the south. It ceased as suddenly as it began, but, in a few minutes a gust as sudden and as short-lived blew from the west. Then it blew again, but from the eastward. This time it was more steady, and in a quarter of an hour it had increased to a smart gale. It seemed to bring some coolness with it, and lifted the oppressed feeling that had rested upon Tom and Jack during the morning. Within an hour or so of sundown this wind died away completely, and then it was as heavy, and as still, and as sultry as ever. Then half an hour passed before anything farther happened.

Jack and Tom were busy scaling and cleaning their fish when, all of a sudden, a shadow fell as though a hand had been stretched out across the sky. Jack ran out of the hut with his knife in his hand, and the next moment Tom heard him calling to him in a loud voice, bidding him to hurry out and look at what was coming. Then Tom dropped everything and ran.

As I said before, there was not a breath of air stirring, and yet a black ragged wrack of clouds was flying wildly above their heads. This bellying sheet of clouds hung very low in the air; above them it was of a dull leaden color, rimmed with a strange reddish light, but toward the west it was as black as ink. Although there was no wind going, a cold air seemed to breathe out of the black emptiness of the west, just such as you may feel when you open the door of a cool room in the summer time. The ocean near to them was grey, with the light from the east, and every now and then a white-cap would gleam, with a pallid light against the darkness behind; but in the distance it grew darker and darker, until the rim of the horizon was lost in the inky pall beyond. Every moment the gloom fell about them, until it seemed as though night had set in, though it was a good hour till sundown. A dull, whispering moaning sound came from out the hollow of the west, and Tom could hear it through all the beating and thundering of the surf behind him. There was something awful in that moaning that seemed to fill the air above and around them; both men stood looking out toward the west, and neither of them said a word. Tom noticed how the sea gulls were running restlessly up and down the beach, uttering shrill wild cries every now and then, but not taking to wing.

And every moment the deep moaning grew louder and louder.

Suddenly a faint breath of air came, and instantly the sound of the surf to the east was dulled as though a blanket had been spread over it. Then there was a pause,—then there was a wild sweep of the wind,—then, in an instant, the hollow roar was upon them and around them.

Out from the blackness of the west came rushing an awful grey cloud of mist and rain and salt spray, and before I can write these words, it struck the island with a tremendous and thunderous uproar. Tom and Jack were flung backward and down to the ground as though a wall had fallen upon them, and all around them was a blinding gloom of sand and rain and spray. Through this whirling darkness Tom saw the cutter lifted up and tossed over and over like a dead leaf. Even through all the uproar he could distinctly hear the noise of snapping and rending and tearing, as the trees and bushes of the thicket near to them were being torn up by the roots. Then he had a vision of one of the palmetto trees being whirled through the air as though it were a straw.

For a while he lay clinging flat to the ground, digging his fingers into the sand; but after a while he saw that Jack was crawling on his hands and knees toward the lee of the sand hills, not far away from where they lay; then he followed him in like manner.

It was a great while before they got safely to the shelter of the duns; I suppose that it could not have taken them less than half an hour to cross the two hundred yards of sand that lay between them and the lee of the sand hills. Every now and then a heavier gust than usual would come, and then they would lay flat upon the sand again, holding on to the shifting surface, as though they feared being blown bodily away. But between the gusts they would contrive to crawl a few feet farther.

At last they reached the lee of the hills, and so were sheltered from the full force of the wind, though the hurricane bellowed and roared above and around them with a noise such as Tom never heard before or since.

The rain increased till it fell in torrents; it did not beat down the wind, for the tempest blew more and more heavily until just before morning, when it was something frightful.

All that night the rain poured down upon them in a deluge, but I do not think that either of them noticed it, their minds being taken up with quite different matters. The darkness around them was utter and blank beyond what I can tell you. You could not have seen your hand within six inches of your face. It seemed as though the end of all things had come.

Tom and Jack sat hand in hand;—when one of them said anything to the other, he had to put his lips to within an inch of his companion’s ear, to make him understand a single word. But very little was said between them, and most of the time they sat holding one another’s hand in silence. Now and then the ground would actually tremble beneath them, and at times a dim fear passed through Tom’s mind that the very sand hill above them would be carried bodily away with the force of that tremendous blast. About day-break, or what would have been day-break at an ordinary time, the rain ceased to fall, though the hurricane still raged with nearly as much fury as ever.

At last the faint grey daylight came, and after a while they were able to see the things around them pretty clearly. The first thing that Tom saw was a white sea gull crouched on the ground close to him. He could have reached out his hand and have touched it, but it did not seem to be in the least afraid at his presence. There were hundreds of them around, but they all seemed to be dulled with terror, and made no effort to move out of the way, or to take to flight.

At length, in the dim morning light, the ocean came out before them; it was a strange sight, for the surf was beaten down by the wind, until the sand beach reached out half as far again as it did on ordinary occasions.

At first they could see nothing of the sandy hook to the southward, for, though no sea was running, and though the ocean was leveled to a seething sheet of whiteness, the water was banked up in the bay, and covered the sand spit completely. The first thought that occurred to Tom was that the whole bar had been swallowed up, and that there had been an earthquake, though they had not noticed it in all the bewilderment of the tempest. But, as the light grew stronger and stronger, they could see the gleam of wet sand here and there, and then could see the water running over it from the bay to the ocean.

By this time the storm was beginning to fall, though they did not dare to leave their shelter for an hour or so later, and though the wind was still heavy until the middle of the afternoon.

When they did leave the lee of the hill, the sight was strange enough; the palmetto trees were all gone but one, and it was more than half stripped of leaves.

One of them had been carried more than a quarter of a mile, and was now lying half buried in the sand at the base of the dun, beneath which they had taken shelter.

There was not a sign of their home in the sand hill, for not only was the place levelled over as completely as though it had never been, but the very shape of the hills themselves had been changed by the sand that had blown against them here, or had been carried away from them there.

The cutter had been swept away to a distance of two or three hundred yards. It had lodged in a hollow between two of the duns. It was lying keel up, and the sand was banked around the weather side of it like a snowdrift. Strange enough, it was not much more broken than it had been before, so they got it back again in a day or two, and it was still sound enough to serve for their roof for the balance of the time that they stayed on the island.

The great stack of brushwood that they had heaped on the highest sand-dun had all been carried away, as had also their signal tree with the bush lashed to it. Everything was salt with the spray that had been carried inland, and the island flats were dotted all over with pools of salt water, that had been blown or swept over the land. Wherever this salt water lay the grass was killed or blackened, so that the following summer the island looked as though fire had passed over it.

Such was the great hurricane of 1814 as Tom Granger and Jack Baldwin felt it; and I think that they both felt it in its full force, though they escaped from it with no more harm than a thorough wetting and a great fright. It took them several weeks to do what they could at making good the damage done, and then it was not fully repaired, for all the provisions that they had stored up had been carried away or had been covered up by the sand that had been blown before the blast.

I think that the greatest loss that they suffered was that of Tom’s jack-knife. He had left it lying beside the fish that he was in the act of cleaning when Jack had called to him and he had run out of the hut. They looked for it every now and then for several days afterward, digging about the place where it had been lost; but their hut or cave in the sand hill had been so completely covered, and the lay of the hill itself had been so entirely changed, that they never found it again.

The loss of a jack-knife may seem but a small thing to tell you, who have only had to slip around the corner and buy a new one at the nearest hardware shop. But there was no hardware shop near to Jack and Tom, and the loss of the jack-knife was a very great ill to them.

Neither did they ever see the tame sea-gull again, and they missed the sight of it from the keel of the upturned boat. I suppose that it must have been swept away and have perished in the hurricane.