"On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees--when there are any trees--all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five sloping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;--for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry; far out you can see, through a good glass, the porpoises at play where of old the sugarcane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams--whole forests of drift--huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven. "And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,--usually at some long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a multitude of blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,--some high enough to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous white growths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,--so long drowned that the shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves;--and beside these are others which have kept their feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand around,--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,--is everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind bearing