er hold,--all this struck
terror to Mysie's heart; and while a heavy, confused noise came
throbbing and ringing through her head, she shut her eyes, and fancied
she had seen her last of earth.

In an instant Caleb was beside her,--his arm about her, holding her
safely where she was; but to continue was impossible for either.

"Ho! Mr. F.!" shouted Caleb; "come this way, will you, and give my wife
your hand? She is a little frightened, and can't go on."

Presently a stout arm and hand appeared from among that nodding, mocking
grass, and a cheery voice exclaimed,--

"Here, my dear lady, take right hold, strong;--you can't pull me
over,--not if you try to."

Unclasping, with some difficulty, her fingers from the rock, into which
they seemed to have grown, Mysie grasped the proffered hand, and the
next moment was safe upon the turf.

"Oh, my good gracious!" muttered the kind old man; but whether the
exclamation was caused by Mysie's face, pale, no doubt, by the effort
necessary to raise her half-fainting figure, or by the idea of the peril
in which she had been, did not appear.

Clarissa, calm and equable, was next passed up by Caleb, who, declining
the proffered hand, drew himself up, by a firm grasp upon the rocky
scarp of the cliff.

"Guess you was scart some then, wa'n't you?" inquired Clarissa, as the
party walked homeward.

"Oh, no!" replied Mysie, quickly. "But I could not get over the top of
the cliff alone,--it was so steep."

"Oh, that was the matter?" drawled the child, with a sidelong glance of
her sharp black eyes.

The northeast wind which went fossilizing with Mysie and Clara on their
first excursion was the precursor of a furious storm of rain and wind,
ranking, according to the dictum of experienced weatherseers, as little
inferior to that famous one in which fell the Minot's Ledge Light-house.

As the gale reached its height, it was a sight at once terrible and
beautiful, to watch, standing in the lantern, the goaded sea, whose
foam-capped waves could plainly be seen at the horizon line, breaking
here and there upon sunken rocks, over which in their playful moods they
scarcely rippled, but on which they now dashed with such white fury as
to make them discernible, even through the darkness of night. One long,
low ridge of submarine rocks, around which seethed a perpetual caldron,
was called the Devil's Bridge; but when erected, or for what purpose,
tradition failed to state.

Never, surely,