At first they could see nothing of the sandy hook to the southward, for, though no sea was running, and though the ocean was leveled to a seething sheet of whiteness, the water was banked up in the bay, and covered the sand spit completely. The first thought that occurred to Tom was that the whole bar had been swallowed up, and that there had been an earthquake, though they had not noticed it in all the bewilderment of the tempest. But, as the light grew stronger and stronger, they could see the gleam of wet sand here and there, and then could see the water running over it from the bay to the ocean. By this time the storm was beginning to fall, though they did not dare to leave their shelter for an hour or so later, and though the wind was still heavy until the middle of the afternoon. When they did leave the lee of the hill, the sight was strange enough; the palmetto trees were all gone but one, and it was more than half stripped of leaves. One of them had been carried more than a quarter of a mile, and was now lying half buried in the sand at the base of the dun, beneath which they had taken shelter. There was not a sign of their home in the sand hill, for not only was the place levelled over as completely as though it had never been, but the very shape of the hills themselves had been changed by the sand that had blown against them here, or had been carried away from them there. The cutter had been swept away to a distance of two or three hundred yards. It had lodged in a hollow between two of the duns. It was lying keel up, and the sand was banked around the weather side of it like a snowdrift. Strange enough, it was not much more broken than it had been before, so they got it back again in a day or two, and it was still sound enough to serve for their roof for the balance of the time that they stayed on the island. The great stack of brushwood that they had heaped on the highest sand-dun had all been carried away, as had also their signal tree with the bush lashed to it. Everything was salt with the spray that had been carried inland, and the island flats were dotted all over with pools of salt water, that had been blown or swept over the land. Wherever this salt water lay the grass was killed or blackened, so that the following summer the island looked as though fire had passed over it. Such was the great hurricane of 1814 as Tom Granger and Jack Baldwin felt it; and I think that they both felt it in its full force, though they escaped from it with no more harm than a thorough wetting and a great fright. It took them several weeks to do what they could at making good the damage done, and then it was not fully repaired, for all the provisions that they had stored up had been carried away or had been covered up by the sand that had been blown before the blast.