is shoulders and on the crown of his hat.

The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here. It
tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to look upon
all opposition which is not animate, as that of the stolid, inexorable
hand of indifference, which wears out the patience more than the
strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and
sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for
conquest: determination; not an insensate standing in the way.

Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were getting
weak already. 'She will never come again; she has been gone ten
minutes,' he said to himself.

This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences just
now: she had really been gone but three.

'As many more minutes will be my end,' he thought.

Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
comparisons at such times.

'This is a summer afternoon,' he said, 'and there can never have been
such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life before.'

He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity; the air
in temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing attitude in which they
approached him that magnified their powers.

He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids,
and into his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of
the sea--visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually
one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them. We
colour according to our moods the objects we survey. The sea would have
been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended the gazer it was
now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision. That narrow white
border was foam, he knew well; but its boisterous tosses were so distant
as to appear a pulsation only, and its plashing was barely audible. A
white border to a black sea--his funeral pall and its edging.

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain descended
from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown; above him
was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all that he loved best.

Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was the
voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and thrust
him hard or softly. The second and distant one was the moan of that
unp