flare from
the opening door of the furnace gushed forth and the whole rugged
interior was illumined with its color. The inadequate moonlight fell
away; the chastened white splendor on the foam of the cataract,
the crystalline glitter, timorously and elusively shifting, were
annihilated; the swiftly descending water showed from within only a
continuously moving glow of yellow light, all the brighter from the
dark-seeming background of the world glimpsed without. A wind had risen,
unfelt in these recesses and on the weighty volume of the main sheet of
falling water, but at its verge the fitful gusts diverted its downward
course, tossing slender jets aslant, and sending now and again a shower
of spray into the cavern. Nehemiah remembered his rheumatism with
a shiver. The shadows of the men, instead of an unintelligible
comminglement with the dusk, were now sharp and distinct, and the light
grotesquely duplicated them till the cave seemed full of beings who were
not there a moment before--strange gnomes, clumsy and burly, slow of
movement, but swift and mysterious of appearance and disappearance. The
beetling ledges here and there imprinted strong black similitudes of
their jagged contours on the floor; with the glowing, weird illumination
the place seemed far more uncanny than before, and Leander, with his
face pensive once more in response to the gentle strains slowly elicited
by the bow trembling with responsive ecstasy, his large eyes full of
dreamy lights, his curling hair falling about his cheek as it rested
upon the violin, his figure, tall and slender and of an adolescent
grace, might have suggested to the imagination a reminiscence of Orpheus
in Hades. They all listened in languid pleasure, without the effort to
appraise the music or to compare it with other performances--the bane of
more cultured audiences; only the ardent amateur, seated close at hand
on a bowlder, watched the bowing with a scrutiny which betokened
earnest anxiety that no mechanical trick might elude him. The miller's
half-grown son, whose ear for any fine distinctions in sound might be
presumed to have been destroyed by the clamors of the mill, sat a trifle
in the background, and sawed away on an imaginary violin with many
flourishes and all the exaggerations of mimicry; he thus furnished the
zest of burlesque relished by the devotees of horse-play and simple
jests, and was altogether unaware that he had a caricature in his shadow
just behind him