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- 7550
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.413Z
- extracted_by
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- start_line
- 7482
- text
- SKETCH NINTH.
HOOD’S ISLE AND THE HERMIT OBERLUS.
“That darkesome glen they enter, where they find
That cursed man low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesly lockes long gronen and unbound,
Disordered hong about his shoulders round,
And hid his face, through which his hollow eyne
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw-bone cheekes, through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into the jawes, as he did never dine.
His garments nought but many ragged clouts,
With thornes together pind and patched reads,
The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts.”
Southeast of Crossman’s Isle lies Hood’s Isle, or McCain’s Beclouded
Isle; and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of
dark pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus’s Landing. It
might fitly have been styled Charon’s.
It received its name from a wild white creature who spent many years
here; in the person of a European bringing into this savage region
qualities more diabolical than are to be found among any of the
surrounding cannibals.
About half a century ago, Oberlus deserted at the above-named island,
then, as now, a solitude. He built himself a den of lava and clinkers,
about a mile from the Landing, subsequently called after him, in a
vale, or expanded gulch, containing here and there among the rocks
about two acres of soil capable of rude cultivation; the only place on
the isle not too blasted for that purpose. Here he succeeded in raising
a sort of degenerate potatoes and pumpkins, which from time to time he
exchanged with needy whalemen passing, for spirits or dollars.
His appearance, from all accounts, was that of the victim of some
malignant sorceress; he seemed to have drunk of Circe’s cup;
beast-like; rags insufficient to hide his nakedness; his befreckled
skin blistered by continual exposure to the sun; nose flat; countenance
contorted, heavy, earthy; hair and beard unshorn, profuse, and of fiery
red. He struck strangers much as if he were a volcanic creature thrown
up by the same convulsion which exploded into sight the isle. All
bepatched and coiled asleep in his lonely lava den among the mountains,
he looked, they say, as a heaped drift of withered leaves, torn from
autumn trees, and so left in some hidden nook by the whirling halt for
an instant of a fierce night-wind, which then ruthlessly sweeps on,
somewhere else to repeat the capricious act. It is also reported to
have been the strangest sight, this same Oberlus, of a sultry, cloudy
morning, hidden under his shocking old black tarpaulin hat, hoeing
potatoes among the lava. So warped and crooked was his strange nature,
that the very handle of his hoe seemed gradually to have shrunk and
twisted in his grasp, being a wretched bent stick, elbowed more like a
savage’s war-sickle than a civilized hoe-handle. It was his mysterious
custom upon a first encounter with a stranger ever to present his back;
possibly, because that was his better side, since it revealed the
least. If the encounter chanced in his garden, as it sometimes did—the
new-landed strangers going from the sea-side straight through the
gorge, to hunt up the queer green-grocer reported doing business
here—Oberlus for a time hoed on, unmindful of all greeting, jovial or
bland; as the curious stranger would turn to face him, the recluse, hoe
in hand, as diligently would avert himself; bowed over, and sullenly
revolving round his murphy hill. Thus far for hoeing. When planting,
his whole aspect and all his gestures were so malevolently and
uselessly sinister and secret, that he seemed rather in act of dropping
poison into wells than potatoes into soil. But among his lesser and
more harmless marvels was an idea he ever had, that his visitors came
equally as well led by longings to behold the mighty hermit Oberlus in
his royal state of solitude, as simply, to obtain potatoes, or find
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