Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/14

 8 inhospitable ever to give them a permanent home; and many among the more newly arrived would gladly have returned to the shores they had reluctantly parted from, had not the wild and stormy main rolled as an impassable barrier between them and the sadly lamented homes they had deserted.

It was in the height of one of those long, fierce, pitiless northeastern storms of mingled rain, snow, sleet, cold, and tempest, which even now smite with such bitter force upon our bleak New England shores, sweeping the shrieking seamen down to their unknown graves, wrecking the hopes of our "merchant princes," and making even the listening landsmen shudder in their sheltered homes—clouds and darkness brooded over the face of the seething deep, whose fierce billows broke on the wide-resounding shore with a reverberation like thunder. The day had been cheerless enough, unvisited by a single gleam of sunshine, and now, as night began to close in over the sodden landscape, the tempest seemed to gather more force, and grow hour by hour more dreary and awful.

In a chamber of a small house, in the then