weeds and
furze, thick with thorns, and their points ran into his fingers. At
times he came on an easier declivity, taking breath as he descended;
then came on the precipice again, and each step necessitated an
expedient. In descending precipices, every movement solves a problem.
One must be skilful under pain of death. These problems the child solved
with an instinct which would have made him the admiration of apes and
mountebanks. The descent was steep and long. Nevertheless he was coming
to the end of it.

Little by little it was drawing nearer the moment when he should land on
the Isthmus, of which from time to time he caught a glimpse. At
intervals, while he bounded or dropped from rock to rock, he pricked up
his ears, his head erect, like a listening deer. He was hearkening to a
diffused and faint uproar, far away to the left, like the deep note of a
clarion. It was a commotion of winds, preceding that fearful north blast
which is heard rushing from the pole, like an inroad of trumpets. At the
same time the child felt now and then on his brow, on his eyes, on his
cheeks, something which was like the palms of cold hands being placed on
his face. These were large frozen flakes, sown at first softly in space,
then eddying, and heralding a snowstorm. The child was covered with
them. The snowstorm, which for the last hour had been on the sea, was
beginning to gain the land. It was slowly invading the plains. It was
entering obliquely, by the north-west, the tableland of Portland.

BOOK THE SECOND.

_THE HOOKER AT SEA_.

CHAPTER I.

SUPERHUMAN LAWS.

The snowstorm is one of the mysteries of the ocean. It is the most
obscure of things meteorological--obscure in every sense of the word. It
is a mixture of fog and storm; and even in our days we cannot well
account for the phenomenon. Hence many disasters.

We try to explain all things by the action of wind and wave; yet in the
air there is a force which is not the wind, and in the waters a force
which is not the wave. That force, both in the air and in the water, is
effluvium. Air and water are two nearly identical liquid masses,
entering into the composition of each other by condensation and
dilatation, so that to breathe is to drink. Effluvium alone is fluid.
The wind and the wave are only impulses; effluvium is a current. The
wind is visible in clouds, the wave is visible in foam; effluvium is
invisible. From time to time, however, it says, "I am