A Sea Upcast by Thomas A. Janvier

My little Tess came to me, a sea upcast, after one of our great northeast gales. I myself found her: lying where the waves had landed her on the shingle, and where they had left her with the fall of the tide.

I was but a bit of a lad myself, then, going on to be eight years old. Storms had no fright in them for me in those days. What I most was thinking about when one was blowing -- while my poor mother, if my father was out in his boat, would be looking wild-eyed seaward, or in the bed-room praying for him on her knees -- was what I'd be picking up on the shingle when the gale was over and the sea gone down. Later on, when I came to know that at the gale's end I might be lying myself on the shingle, along with the other wreckage, I got to looking at storms in a different way.