Still, brilliant ‘soundser’ as old Bill was, he was far greater as a wrecker; since I am now about to relate an occurrence in the line which proves him a veritable hero.  As is perfectly well known, our American coast is often the scene of fearful storms, which deal out wide-spread destruction to mariners.  With us, these gales are commonest in February, and hence this month is held in marked dread.  Some years ago, in the season referred to, a storm burst upon our shores, whose like only a few of the older among us had ever known.  After fitfully moaning from the northward and eastward for a day or two, the wind, one morning, finally settled due north-east,—­thus sweeping directly upon the land,—­and blew a hurricane.  It was excessively cold, too, yet not so cold but that a fine, dry snow was falling, though from the fury of the wind this could settle nowhere, but was driven, whirling and surging, before the blast in dense clouds.  In short, it was a time of truly unearthly wildness; and our hearts sank the deeper in us, since we knew what ere long must inevitably occur.  At last, within an hour or two of nightfall, the sound of a ship’s bell, rung hurriedly, pealed towards us along the uproar of the tempest, and by this we were made aware that a vessel had been wrecked on a certain shoal rising up in the ocean, about two miles from that part of the beach nearest our village.  To go to the rescue of this vessel, at this time, was absolutely impossible.  For, to say nothing of the wrath of the winds, the air was so thick with snow that, in the speedily advancing hours of darkness, in which we should not fail to be entrapped, we would be powerless to find our way at sea a foot.  There was no help for it; the poor victims of the shipwreck must that very night know death in one or another most terrifying shape, ’if it was the will of the Lord.’  With this mournful conviction, about twenty of us gathered at old Bill’s house with the closing in of a darkness as of Tartarus, and kept its watches.  The anger of the storm abated in no way whatever till morning, and then the sole change that took place was a somewhat thinner aspect of the driving snow.  Yet, even when this was discerned, every man of us hastened to draw over his ordinary winter garb an oil-cloth suit which enveloped him from head to foot, and soberly announced himself ready to do his duty in the strait.  That we should be exposed to the greatest dangers was absolutely certain; and whether a single survivor of the terrors of that awful night yet clung to the few frail timbers in the sea, for us to rescue, none but Heaven knew; still, the manhood of each demanded that what was possible to be done in the matter we should at least attempt.