his
hand. Ruby was puzzled again. He had not supposed that the pulpit was
the proper place, but modestly attributed this to his ignorance.

"Stop those bells!" said the clergyman, with stern solemnity; but they
went on.

"Stop them, I say!" he roared in a voice of thunder.

The sexton, pulling the ropes in the middle of the church, paid no
attention.

Exasperated beyond endurance, the clergyman hurled the prayer book at
the sexton's head, and felled him! Still the bells went on of their own
accord.

"Stop! sto-o-o-op! I say," he yelled fiercely, and, hitting the pulpit
with his fist, he split it from top to bottom.

Minnie cried "Shame!" at this, and from that moment the bells ceased.

Whether it was that the fog-bells ceased at that time, or that Minnie's
voice charmed Ruby's thoughts away, we cannot tell, but certain it is
that the severely tried youth became entirely oblivious of everything.
The marriage-party vanished with the bells; Minnie, alas, faded away
also; finally, the roar of the sea round the Bell Rock, the rock itself,
its lighthouse and its inmates, and all connected with it, faded from
the sleeper's mind, and:--

"Like the baseless fabric of a vision
Left not a wrack behind."

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE.

CONCLUSION.

Facts are facts; there is no denying that. They cannot be controverted;
nothing can overturn them, or modify them, or set them aside. There
they stand in naked simplicity; mildly contemptuous alike of sophists
and theorists.

Immortal facts! Bacon founded on you; Newton found you out; Dugald
Stewart and all his fraternity reasoned on you, and followed in your
wake. What _would_ this world be without facts? Rest assured, reader,
that those who ignore facts and prefer fancies are fools. We say it
respectfully. We have no intention of being personal, whoever you may
be.

On the morning after Ruby was cast on the Bell Rock, our old friend Ned
O'Connor (having been appointed one of the lighthouse-keepers, and
having gone for his fortnight ashore in the order of his course) sat on
the top of the signal-tower at Arbroath with a telescope at his eye
directed towards the lighthouse, and became aware of a fact,--a fact
which seemed to be contradicted by those who ought to have known better.

Ned soliloquised that morning. His soliloquy will explain the
circumstances to which we refer; we therefore record it here. "What's
that? Sure there's something wrong wid me e