on such a night than have bodies to
them, or than any but such as she can see. If any one ever talked
with angels, that maid does; and I've heard her, too; I can say I
have--certain of it. Those that like may call her an innocent: but I
wish I were such an innocent, Mr. Brown. I'd be nearer heaven then,
here on earth, than I fear sometimes I ever shall be, even after I'm
dead and gone."

"Well, she's a good girl, mazed or not; but look at her now! What's
she after?"

The girl had raised her head, and was pointing, with one arm stretched
stiffly out toward the sea.

Old Willis went down to her, and touched her gently on the shoulder.

"Come home, my maid, then, you'll take cold, indeed;" but she did not
move or lower her arm.

The old man, accustomed to her fits of fixed melancholy, looked down
under her bonnet, to see whether she was "past," as he called it. By
the moonlight he could see her great eyes steady and wide open. She
motioned him away, half impatiently, and then sprang to her feet with
a scream.

"A man! A man! Save him!"

As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of
the point in a broad sheet of foam.

And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked
wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast;
and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the
Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts,
over the edge of the rock.

"Save him!" shrieked she again, as twenty men rushed forward--and
stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them: but close to
him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten
feet wide, cutting the point across. All knew it: its slippery edge,
its polished upright sides, the seething cauldrons within it; and
knew, too, that the next wave would boil up from it in a hundred jets,
and suck in the strongest to his doom, to fall, with brains dashed
out, into a chasm from which was no return.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come. Up the
slope it went, one half of it burying the wretched mariner, and fell
over into the chasm. The other half rushed up the chasm itself, and
spouted forth again to the moonlight in columns of snow, in time to
meet the wave from which it had just parted, as it fell from above;
and then the two boiled up, and round, and over, and swirled along the
smooth rock to their very feet.

The schoolmistress