Just as she sighted the canoe, which Paul had hauled upon the shore, a
sharp, rattling clap of thunder peeled above her head. This was preceded
an instant before by a dazzling blue and golden flash that all but
blinded the band of wanderers. Another and another flash, followed by
their thunderbolts, in quick succession shattered a solid rock over
which they had just passed. The whole shore appeared to tremble and
crash, and away far out over the surface of the bay the waters seemed as
if in a blaze. The sight was grand and terrible. Every rock along the
shore appeared to sink into an abyss as the lightning passed by, and
many of them were riven. At length Mrs. Godfrey and her children reached
the side of the canoe. There calm and unmoved amid the storm, she knelt,
she wept, she prayed. The waters of Fundy were heaped into angry
billows, and dashed their spray over the mother and children assembled
round the altar on the shore. Darkness began to throw its sable mantle
over land, rocks and bay. Margaret was suddenly started, she thought she
heard the sound of a voice coming through the gloom. She turned her head
in the direction of the sound, and at that moment a flash of lightning
revealed a human form coming toward her. In an instant it was lost to
view, shut out in the darkness. "Me come!" "Me come!" fell upon her
waiting ears. Margaret, with a heart overflowing with gratitude and
swelling with praise, quietly exclaimed "God is love." Paul stood before
her, panting like a stricken deer, with but one of the children in his
arms. As Margaret looked at him her pale face turned ashen white, her
lips quivered and she fell into the arms of Paul Guidon as if dead. He
sat down upon a rock, and by the lightning's flash bathed her temples
with water from the sea shore. The Indian continued to pour salt water
out of his brawny hands upon her head and neck. In about ten minutes
Margaret was restored to consciousness. When she opened her eyes her
missing child was at her side. Paul Guidon had placed the little fellow
in charge of an Indian he had found fishing on the bank of the stream,
and he asked him to take the child in his arms and follow on to the
shore.
After Paul had been fishing along the stream for some time, seeing that
Mrs. Godfrey and her children had not come up with him, he decided to
return and look them up.
As they rested together on the shore beside their birchen boat, the
thunder gradually died away, and the
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