shooting
down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as
hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky,
that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay
stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into
whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and
a kind of terror--that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always
excites in the mind.

I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river
by a lonely path. Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess
of the beach. It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me,
and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk,
especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our
long financial depression. However, I decided to go on. Several
overturned fishing-boats lay upon the beach, with a net drying upon one
of them. A few clamshells were scattered about, and near the door of a
small cabin lay a pile of split kindlings. The cabin was considerably
smaller in size than an English railway-carriage, and nestled under the
overhanging bank of the river. No human being was visible at first. But
presently I detected by the red glow of his pipe a man in the interior
of the cabin. I sat down on a boat, not venturing to approach nearer
and beard the old lion in his lair. But on his inviting me to come in I
went up to the door. It was, however, only a meaningless form of speech
that led him to say "Come in," for it would hardly have been possible
to get into a cabin only five feet wide, with the man himself sitting
by a large rusty stove right over against the door. He placed a
bootjack in the doorway for me to sit down upon. There was no window in
the cabin. Firkins of fish were piled up along the sides of the
interior, and in the dim background I saw a rude framework covered with
straw which served as a bed.

And now for the human being there. The most noticeable peculiarity
about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from
the front part of his neck. This wen was fully as large as a man's
head. Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard
reached to the middle of his breast--

His beard a foot before him, and his hair
A yard behind.

His moustache alone showed signs of the scissors: he had there cleared
a path through the russet jungle of his beard, that an entra