et
wilder and more impetuous than the last, until at length the sullen
distant roar--and then the low, surging murmurs announced that the
greatest danger had overblown, and that the hurricane was winding its
tortuous pathway through the forests many miles away to the right.

Gradually the devastations of the awful skies became mellowed down;
the wheeling clouds began to dispart, and a gush of heavy drops came
pattering from above. Moaning pitifully, the prostrate and bowed trees
and undergrowth lifted their mangled boughs from the compressed state
into which they had been forced--those which had survived the tempest,
seemingly with a painful effort, regaining their upright and natural
position.

Soon the heavy and dank air grew fresher; the wrathful clouds
separated, and the moon once more gleamed forth in resplendent beauty
and brightness. By degrees the gloom retired from the face of the
heavens, the stars looked down gloriously from their sapphire thrones,
and a silvery gush played amidst the swaying foliage, where the
rain-drops glistened on their leaflet platforms like so many diamonds.
Then the lucid milky-way, whose loveliness flushes the firmament, bent
itself across the concave above, one broad flame of pure transparent
white, as if some burning orb had fled along the sky with so swift a
flight, that, for a moment, it had left its lustre in the vault of
heaven. Gradually all was lulled into stillness, and nature became as
one great solitude.

Awe-stricken and bewildered, David White remounted his quivering
steed, and slowly wound his way along the ruin-covered road. One by
one the appearances which told a near approach to his destination came
into view; and finally he stood before the home of his childhood,
which was now to be the scene of a great and heinous crime. Carefully
hitching his horse in the dark shadows of some ancient oaks at the
head of the lane, he softly opened the gate, and glided round the
house until he stood at a little window which looked out from his
mother's chamber, and next the old stone chimney. For the night, she
was absent at a distant neighbor's, which circumstance, together with
that of her having withdrawn a large amount of funds from the
possession of the village minister, had induced the present visit.
But when he saw the shutter open, a thing wholly unexpected, it
flashed through his mind that he was watched--that this was an
allurement to ensnare him; so he shrunk back into