Bedquilt

Five hundred years ago, that ugly whirl of muddy surf, 100 square miles in area, was a fruitful field, "50 Villages upon it, one Town, several Monasteries and 50,000 souls:" till on Christmas midnight A.D. 1277, the winds and the storm-rains having got to their height, Ocean and Ems did, "about midnight," undermine the place, folded it over like a friable bedquilt or monstrous doomed griddle-cake, and swallowed it all away.

We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fishline as thick as my little finger with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog-collar, and a horseshoe, and some vials of medicine that didn't have no label on them; and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg.

"Sold!" yelped the auctioneer--"sold to madame the widow Dupuis of Hirondelette," who was now elbowing her broad way through the crowd to her bargain which she struggled out with, red and perspiring, to the mud-smeared lawn, where her eldest daughter shrewdly examined the bedquilt for holes.