y drenched and shivering, his
brain on fire with fancies. What was vision to Dante was real to him. He
lay upon the edge of the fathomless gulf, warm and living, with the cry
from Hades made audible to him; as it ebbed and flowed, it wailed like
the wind through leafless forests; it shook the earth to its centre,
then died into the solitary cry of one in nameless pain. Some broad,
dark figure stood afterwards beside him in the fog, and a voice repeated
the old word of the prophet,--

"Hell from beneath is moved to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up
the dead for thee"--

"There is no hell," he cried, getting up and staggering forward,--then
smiled at his own folly.

It might have been Lufflin who had spoken, after all; he was well read
in the Bible. But he could see no sign of their torches, in the stretch
of damp, darkening fog; he was left alone to keep guard.

Jacobus tried to shake off his sickly fancies, and measure coolly
whatever danger waited in this strange night; but it rose before him in
a form so ghastly and new that his strength was but as a woman's. He was
but a landsman,--dull and ignorant besides, outside his library. What
was he to do, when the very ground trembled beneath his feet,--when the
sky was blotted out,--when, there was lack of a single known stationary
object to guide eye or ear? This side of that gray horizon of darkness
which absorbed all his fears, the northern lights streamed up, a pale
orange glare, and showed him a heavy, impenetrable bulwark of shadow,
that rose closer and closer with each throb of the breakers, walling out
the sea. His feet sank curiously in the yielding sand, as if he stood at
the verge of a maelstrom. Some rough hand griping his shoulder roused
him from his daze.

"Cathcart!" he said; then pointing out, "what lies yonder, George? It
might be Death's world, I think!"

The fisherman's arm shook, he fancied; but he answered steadily, in his
usual piping, weak tones,--

"It don't matter whether it's God's world or the Devil's world, as I
see, so long as it kin send ashore a grip on us like that,"--glancing
down at his feet, where Jacobus saw the yellow, flaky foam curling up
from under the sand. He stooped leisurely to examine it.

"What does this portend?" he asked.

"God! it be the tide, man," shrieked out Cathcart, with an oath. "Can't
you see that it's broken over the topmost boundaries? You be standing
now above the level of your own house."

One s