Tides of Barnegat
“The Tides of Barnegat is a romance spanning a twenty year period from 1854 until 1874, with a highly melodramatic final chapter involving the newly organized U.S. Lifesaving Service in a tragic ship wreck....This scene of high drama comes as the resolution of a tightly constructed novel by a remarkable man.”
— from the new Introduction by John Bailey Lloyd
Excerpts from The Tides of Barnegat
©2001 Down The Shore Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
From Chapter III - Little Tod Fogarty:
As he approached the old House of Refuge, black in the moonlight and looking twice its size in the stretch of endless beach, he noticed for the hundredth time how like a crouching woman it appeared, with its hipped roof hunched up like a shoulder close propped against the dune and its overhanging eaves but a draped hood shading its thoughtful brow; an illusion which vanished when its square form, with its wide door and long platform pointing to the sea, came into view.
From Chapter XIII - Scootsy’s Epithet:
Other records are strewn along the beach; these the tide alone cannot efface - the bow of some hapless schooner it may be, wrenched from its hull, and sent whirling shoreword; the shattered mast and crosstrees of a stranded ship beaten to death in the breakers; or some battered capstan carried in the white teeth of the surf-dogs and dropped beyond the froth-line. To these with the help of the south wind, the tides extend their mercy, burying them deep with successive blankets of sand, hiding their bruised bodies, covering their nakedness and the marks of their sufferings. All through the restful summer and late autumn these battered derelicts lie buried, while above their graves the children play and watch the ships go by, or stretch themselves at length, their eyes on the circling gulls.
From Chapter IV - Ann Gossaway’s Red Cloak:
When she sang she sang as a bird sings, as much to relieve its own overcharged little body, full to bursting with the music in its soul, as to gladden the surrounding woods with its melody — because, too, she could not help it and because the notes lay nearest her bubbling heart and could find their only outlet through her lips.
— from the new Introduction by John Bailey Lloyd
