placed on the
companion, and raised it above his head.

The wreck was going down. As he sank, the doctor murmured the rest of
the prayer.

For an instant his shoulders were above water, then his head, then
nothing remained but his arm holding up the flask, as if he were showing
it to the Infinite.

His arm disappeared; there was no greater fold on the deep sea than
there would have been on a tun of oil. The snow continued falling.

One thing floated, and was carried by the waves into the darkness. It
was the tarred flask, kept afloat by its osier cover.

BOOK THE THIRD.

_THE CHILD IN THE SHADOW_.

CHAPTER I.

CHESIL.

The storm was no less severe on land than on sea. The same wild
enfranchisement of the elements had taken place around the abandoned
child. The weak and innocent become their sport in the expenditure of
the unreasoning rage of their blind forces. Shadows discern not, and
things inanimate have not the clemency they are supposed to possess.

On the land there was but little wind. There was an inexplicable
dumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of the falling
snow was fearful.

Hailstones strike, harass, bruise, stun, crush. Snowflakes do worse:
soft and inexorable, the snowflake does its work in silence; touch it,
and it melts. It is pure, even as the hypocrite is candid. It is by
white particles slowly heaped upon each other that the flake becomes an
avalanche and the knave a criminal.

The child continued to advance into the mist. The fog presents but a
soft obstacle; hence its danger. It yields, and yet persists. Mist, like
snow, is full of treachery. The child, strange wrestler at war with all
these risks, had succeeded in reaching the bottom of the descent, and
had gained Chesil. Without knowing it he was on an isthmus, with the
ocean on each side; so that he could not lose his way in the fog, in the
snow, or in the darkness, without falling into the deep waters of the
gulf on the right hand, or into the raging billows of the high sea on
the left. He was travelling on, in ignorance, between these two abysses.

The Isthmus of Portland was at this period singularly sharp and rugged.
Nothing remains at this date of its past configuration. Since the idea
of manufacturing Portland stone into Roman cement was first seized, the
whole rock has been subjected to an alteration which has completely
changed its original appearance. Calcareous lias, slate, and trap ar