though death were coming through it;
solid masses of gray, wet mist moved, slower than the wind, from point
to point, like gigantic ghosts gathering to the call of the murderous
sea.

"Yonder go the shades of Ossian's heroes," said Mary Defourchet to her
companion, pointing through the darkening air.

They were driving carefully in an old-fashioned gig, in one of the lulls
of the storm, along the edge of a pine wood, early in the afternoon. The
old Doctor,--for it was MacAulay, (Dennis,) from over in Monmouth
County, she was with,--the old man did not answer, having enough to do
to guide his mare, the sleet drove so in his eyes. Besides, he was
gruffer than usual this afternoon, looking with the trained eyes of an
old water-dog out to the yellow line of the sea to the north. Miss
Defourchet pulled the oil-skin cloth closer about her knees, and held
her tongue; she relished the excitement of this fierce fighting the
wind, though; it suited the nervous tension which her mind had undergone
lately.

It was a queer, lonesome country, the lee coast,--never so solitary as
now, perhaps; older than the rest of the world, she fancied,--so many of
Nature's voices, both of bird and vegetable, had been entirely lost out
of it: no wonder it had grown unfruitful, and older and dumber and sad,
listening for ages to the unremorseful, cruel cries of the sea; these
dead bodies, too, washed up every year on its beaches, must haunt it,
though it was not guilty. She began to say something of this to Doctor
Dennis, tired of being silent.

"Your country seems to me always to shut itself out from the world," she
said; "from the time I enter that desolate region on its border of dwarf
oaks and gloomy fires of the charcoal-burners, I think of the old leper
and his cry of 'Unclean! unclean!'"

MacAulay glances anxiously at her, trying to keep pace with her meaning.

"It's a lonesome place enough," he said, slowly. "There be but the two
or three farm-keepers; and the places go from father to son, father to
son. The linen and carpet-mats in that house you're in now come down
from the times before Washington. Stay-at-home, quiet people,--only the
men that follow the water, in each generation. There be but little to be
made from these flats of white sand. Yes, quiet enough: the beasts of
prey aren't scaret out of these pine forests yet, I heard the cry of a
panther the other night only, coming from Tom's River: close by the road
it was: sharp a