Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

"THE BLOODY QUAKER,"
From the very beginning of Howard Pyle's weeks in
Rehoboth, as soon as he had felt the spell of the sand dunes'
secrecy, the fondness for pirates was strong in his heart. He
began to collect books on the subject, and gradually that
library, which Mr. Marvin alluded to in the quotation at
the beginning of this chapter, came to include almost every
book which could shed any light upon the lives and deeds
of Morgan, or Kidd, or Teach, or any of the notorious freebooters of a former age. These books he read with a relish;
even the dry and somewhat pedantic accounts of trials and
examinations were of unflagging interest so long as they
contained a thread of information about a buccaneer. He
was steeped in pirate lore, his own vivid imagination
decorating the narratives from the books with -romantic
lights and shadows.
The first creation that rose out of this buccaneering
interest was a novel, The Rose of Paradise, published first
in Harper's Weekly as a serial during the summer months
Of 18 87, and then as a book in the following year. Before
this, in 1885, he had published a novel entitled Within the
Capes, a book which the Saturday Review called a "rattling
good yarn very well spun." But Within the Capes,
although it was a tale of the sea, full of adventure and
thrills, even though it included a treasure which the hero
found on a deserted island, contains no characters who are
pirates. The book is in a way, however, a preparation, an
experimental background, as it were, for this new launching
into the seas of piratical history. In Within the Capes
Howard Pyle learned to handle the fundamentals of an
exciting story, and trained his imagination towards marine
subjects, all of which was of inestimable value to him when
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