ything you like. I'll quarrel with you, and you can
insult my pictures. It will agreeably stimulate us both. Don't go,
Smith--"

"If I stay, may I marry Wilna?"

"If you ask me I won't let you!"

"Very well!" I retorted, angrily. "Then I'll marry her anyway!"

"That's the way to talk! Don't go, Smith. I'm really beginning to like
you. And when Billy Green arrives you and he will have a delightfully
violent scene--"

"What!"

He rubbed his hands gleefully.

"He's in love with Wilna. You and he won't get on. It is going to be very
stimulating for me--I can see that! You and he are going to behave most
disagreeably to each other. And I shall be exceedingly unpleasant to you
both! Come, Smith, promise me that you'll stay!"

Profoundly worried, I stood staring at him in the moonlight, gnawing my
mustache.

"Very well," I said, "I'll remain if--"

Something checked me, I did not quite know what for a moment. Blythe,
too, was staring at me in an odd, apprehensive way. Suddenly I realised
that under my feet the ground was stirring.

"Look out!" I cried; but speech froze on my lips as beneath me the solid
earth began to rock and crack and billow up into a high, crumbling ridge,
moving continually, as the sod cracks, heaves up, and crumbles above the
subterranean progress of a mole.

Up into the air we were slowly pushed on the ever-growing ridge; and with
us were carried rocks and bushes and sod, and even forest trees.

I could hear their tap-roots part with pistol-like reports; see great
pines and hemlocks and oaks moving, slanting, settling, tilting crazily
in every direction as they were heaved upward in this gigantic
disturbance.

Blythe caught me by the arm; we clutched each other, balancing on the
crest of the steadily rising mound.

"W-what is it?" he stammered. "Look! It's circular. The woods are rising
in a huge circle. What's happening? Do you know?"

Over me crept a horrible certainty that _something living_ was moving
under us through the depths of the earth--something that, as it
progressed, was heaping up the surface of the world above its unseen
and burrowing course--something dreadful, enormous, sinister, and
_alive_!

"Look out!" screamed Blythe; and at the same instant the crumbling summit
of the ridge opened under our feet and a fissure hundreds of yards long
yawned ahead of us.

And along it, shining slimily in the moonlight, a vast, viscous, ringed
surface was moving, retracting, und