Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/44

38 main-land by an arm of Shoalwater Bay, extending almost down to the light-house. A splendid drive down from the bay! It is in the sandy marshes up along this arm of Shoalwater Bay, too, that we may go to find cranberries.

When we ask, "What does he do when the thick fogs hang over the coast?" he shows us a great bell, which, when the machinery is wound up, tolls, tolls, tolls, solemnly in the darkness, to warn vessels off the coast. "But," he says, "it is not large enough, and can not be heard any great distance. Vessels usually keep out to sea in a fog, and ring their own bells to keep off other vessels."

Then he shows us, at our request, Peacock Spit, where the United States vessel of that name was wrecked, in 1841; and the South Spit, nearly two miles outside the cape, where the Shark, another United States vessel, was lost in 1846. The bones of many a gallant sailor, and many a noble ship, are laid on the sands, not half a dozen miles from the spot where we now stand and look at a tranquil ocean. Nor was it in storms that these shipping disasters happened. It was the treacherous calm that met them on the bar, when the current or the tide carried them upon the sands, where they lay helpless until the flood-tide met the current, and the. ship was broken up in the breakers. Pilotage and steam have done away with shipwrecks on the bar.

We are glad to think that it is so. Having exhausted local topics for conversation, we descend the winding stairs, which remind us of those in the "Spider and the Fly"—so hard are they to "come down again." How still and warm it is down under the shelter of the earth-works! Descending by the military road, which