ge, Don Benito did not visit him. Nor then, nor at any
time after, would he look at him. Before the tribunal he refused. When
pressed by the judges he fainted. On the testimony of the sailors alone
rested the legal identity of Babo.

Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the
black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many
days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza,
met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites; and across the Plaza looked
towards St. Bartholomew's church, in whose vaults slept then, as now,
the recovered bones of Aranda: and across the Rimac bridge looked
towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia without; where, three months
after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier,
did, indeed, follow his leader.

THE LIGHTNING-ROD MAN.

What grand irregular thunder, thought I, standing on my hearth-stone
among the Acroceraunian hills, as the scattered bolts boomed overhead,
and crashed down among the valleys, every bolt followed by zigzag
irradiations, and swift slants of sharp rain, which audibly rang, like a
charge of spear-points, on my low shingled roof. I suppose, though, that
the mountains hereabouts break and churn up the thunder, so that it is
far more glorious here than on the plain. Hark!--someone at the door.
Who is this that chooses a time of thunder for making calls? And why
don't he, man-fashion, use the knocker, instead of making that doleful
undertaker's clatter with his fist against the hollow panel? But let him
in. Ah, here he comes. "Good day, sir:" an entire stranger. "Pray be
seated." What is that strange-looking walking-stick he carries: "A fine
thunder-storm, sir."

"Fine?--Awful!"

"You are wet. Stand here on the hearth before the fire."

"Not for worlds!"

The stranger still stood in the exact middle of the cottage, where he
had first planted himself. His singularity impelled a closer scrutiny. A
lean, gloomy figure. Hair dark and lank, mattedly streaked over his
brow. His sunken pitfalls of eyes were ringed by indigo halos, and
played with an innocuous sort of lightning: the gleam without the bolt.
The whole man was dripping. He stood in a puddle on the bare oak floor:
his strange walking-stick vertically resting at his side.

It was a polished copper rod, four feet long, lengthwise attached to a
neat wooden staff, by insertion into two balls of greenish glass, ringed
with copper ban