er and shrinking away from the quick fiery glare. The large drops
descend with force upon the slated roofs and rise again in smoke.
There is a rush and roar as of a river through the air, and muddy
streams bubble majestically along the pavement, whirl their dusky foam
into the kennel, and disappear beneath iron grates. Thus did Arethusa
sink. I love not my station here aloft in the midst of the tumult
which I am powerless to direct or quell, with the blue lightning
wrinkling on my brow and the thunder muttering its first awful
syllables in my ear. I will descend. Yet let me give another glance to
the sea, where the foam breaks out in long white lines upon a broad
expanse of blackness or boils up in far-distant points like snowy
mountain-tops in the eddies of a flood; and let me look once more at
the green plain and little hills of the country, over which the giant
of the storm is striding in robes of mist, and at the town whose
obscured and desolate streets might beseem a city of the dead; and,
turning a single moment to the sky, now gloomy as an author's
prospects, I prepare to resume my station on lower earth. But stay! A
little speck of azure has widened in the western heavens; the sunbeams
find a passage and go rejoicing through the tempest, and on yonder
darkest cloud, born like hallowed hopes of the glory of another world
and the trouble and tears of this, brightens forth the rainbow.

THE HOLLOW OF THE THREE HILLS.

In those strange old times when fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries
were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met
together at an appointed hour and place. One was a lady graceful in
form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled and smitten with an
untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her
years; the other was an ancient and meanly-dressed woman of
ill-favored aspect, and so withered, shrunken and decrepit that even
the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary
term of human existence. In the spot where they encountered no mortal
could observe them. Three little hills stood near each other, and down
in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin almost mathematically
circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth and of such depth that
a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines
were numerous upon the hills and partly fringed the outer verge of the
intermediate hollow, within which there was nothi