e that Mr. Gabriel hadn't any need to grope as we do, but
that suddenly he saw the Heavenly Arm and clung to it, and the grasp
closed round him, and death and hell can have no power over him now.
Dan, poor boy, is it better to lie in the earth with the ore than to
be forged in the furnace and beaten to a blade fit for the hands of
archangels?"

And mother stopped, trembling like a leaf.

I'd been wiping and screwing the glass, and I'd waited a breath, for
mother always talked so like a preacher; but when she'd finished, after
a second or two Dan looked up, and said, as if he'd just come in--

"Aunt Rhody! how come you out of bed?"

And then mother, she got upon the bed, and she took Dan's head on her
breast and fell to stroking his brows, laying her cool palms on his
temples and on his eyelids, as once I'd have given my ears to do,--and I
slipped out of the room.

Oh, I hated to go up those stairs, to mount that ladder, to open the
scuttle! And once there, I waited and waited before I dared to look. The
night had unnerved me. At length I fixed the glass. I swept the broad
swollen stream, to the yellowing woods, and over the meadows, where a
pale transient beam crept under and pried up the hay-cocks,--the smoke
that began to curl from the chimneys and fall as soon,--the mists
blowing off from Indian Hill, but brooding blue and dense down the
turnpike, and burying the red spark of the moon, that smothered like a
half-dead coal in her ashes,--anywhere, anywhere but that spot! I don't
know why it was, but I couldn't level the glass there,--my arm would
fall, my eye haze. Finally I brought it round nearer and tried again.
Everywhere, as far as your eye could reach, the sea was yeasty and white
with froth, and great streaks of it were setting up the inky river,
and against it there were the twin light-houses quivering their little
yellow rays as if to mock the dawn, and far out on the edge of day the
great light at the Isles of Shoals blinked and blinked, crimson and
gold, fainter and fainter, and lost at last. It was no use, I didn't
dare point it, my hand trembled so I could see nothing plain, when
suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into
stillness. The tube slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney,
and there----What was it in the field? what ghastly picture?

The glass crashed from my hand, and I staggered shrieking down the
ladder.

The sound wasn't well through my lips, whe