The
narrow strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was
covered at high tide by a shining film of water, at low tide with
the cast-up offerings of sea and shore. Logs yet green, and
saplings washed away from inland banks, battered fragments of
wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken into tiny rafts yet
odorous with their lost freight, lay in long successive curves,--
the fringes and overlappings of the sea. At high noon the shadow
of a seagull's wing, or a sudden flurry and gray squall of sand-
pipers, themselves but shadows, was all that broke the monotonous
glare of the level sands.
He had lived there alone for a twelvemonth. Although but a few
miles from a thriving settlement, during that time his retirement
had never been intruded upon, his seclusion remained unbroken. In
any other community he might have been the subject of rumor or
criticism, but the miners at Camp Rogue and the traders at Trinidad
Head, themselves individual and eccentric, were profoundly
indifferent to all other forms of eccentricity or heterodoxy that
did not come in contact with their own.
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