e seemed to sit at the foot of God,
satisfied. While he thus sate, a great wind sprang up outside and
thundered in the rocks; fiercer and fiercer it blew, and soon there
followed it the loud crying of the sea, as the great waters began to
heave and rage. Then David bestirred himself to light and trim his lamp,
and set it in the window as a warning to ships. And when he had done
this he felt a great and sudden weariness, and he laid himself down; and
sleep closed over him at once, as the sea closes over a stone that is
flung into it.

Once in the night he woke, with the roar of the storm in his ears, and
wondered that he had slept through it. He had been through many stormy
nights, but he had never heard the like of this. The wind blew with a
steady roar, like a flood of thunder outpoured; in the midst of if, the
great waves, hurled upon the rocks, uttered their voices; and between he
heard the hiss of the water, as it rushed downwards from the cliff face.
In the midst of all came a sharp and sudden wailing cry; and then he
began to wonder what the poor ship was doing, which he thought of as
riding furiously at her anchor, with the drunken crew, and the old man
with his sad and solemn face, who seemed so different from his unruly
followers, and yet was not ashamed to rule over them and draw profit
from their evil deeds. In spite of the ill they had tried to do him, he
felt a great pity for them in his heart; but this was but for a moment,
for sleep closed over him again, and drew him down into forgetfulness.

When David woke in the morning, the gale had died away, but the sky wept
from low and ragged clouds, as if ashamed and sullen at the wrath of the
day before. Water trickled in the cracks of the rock; and when David
peered abroad, he looked into the thin drifting clouds. He had a great
content in his heart, but the awe and the strange peace of the night had
somehow diminished.

He began to reflect upon the light that he had seen from the sea. It was
not his lamp that had given out such light, for it was clear and thin,
while the light his own lamp gave was angry and red. Moreover, when he
had lighted the lamp before the storm, it was standing idle, not in the
window-place, but on the rock-shelf where he had set it. Then he knew
that some great and holy mystery had been wrought for him that night,
and that he had been very tenderly used.

Presently he descended the cliff, and went out upon the seaward side.
The wa