The tidal wave of 1856 takes a Louisiana island resort in one night, and a Spanish fisherman's family finds a child alive in the wreckage — whose own father is still alive, and looking. Hearn was born on a Greek island to an Irish surgeon, abandoned by both parents, blinded in one eye, and worked as a Cincinnati crime reporter before New Orleans and then Japan; the hurricane in this 1889 novella is the best prose he wrote in English. Fifty-nine plates, from Homer and Turner to Fitz Henry Lane, trace the sea and shore that give this story of loss and rescue its weather.
