to
career over the house, and sail high up into the murky air. The dash of
the rising tide came with successive crash upon crash like the discharge
of heavy artillery, seeming to shake the very house, and the spray
borne by the wind dashed whizzing against the window-panes.

Zephaniah, rising from supper, drew up the little stand that had the
family Bible on it, and the three old time-worn people sat themselves as
seriously down to evening worship as if they had been an extensive
congregation. They raised the old psalm-tune which our fathers called
"Complaint," and the cracked, wavering voices of the women, with the
deep, rough bass of the old sea-captain, rose in the uproar of the storm
with a ghostly, strange wildness, like the scream of the curlew or the
wailing of the wind:--

"Spare us, O Lord, aloud we pray,
Nor let our sun go down at noon:
Thy years are an eternal day,
And must thy children die so soon!"

Miss Ruey valued herself on singing a certain weird and exalted part
which in ancient days used to be called counter, and which wailed and
gyrated in unimaginable heights of the scale, much as you may hear a
shrill, fine-voiced wind over a chimney-top; but altogether, the deep
and earnest gravity with which the three filled up the pauses in the
storm with their quaint minor key, had something singularly impressive.
When the singing was over, Zephaniah read to the accompaniment of wind
and sea, the words of poetry made on old Hebrew shores, in the dim, gray
dawn of the world:--

"The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of glory thundereth;
the Lord is upon many waters. The voice of the Lord shaketh the
wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh. The Lord sitteth
upon the floods, yea, the Lord sitteth King forever. The Lord will give
strength to his people; yea, the Lord will bless his people with peace."

How natural and home-born sounded this old piece of Oriental poetry in
the ears of the three! The wilderness of Kadesh, with its great cedars,
was doubtless Orr's Island, where even now the goodly fellowship of
black-winged trees were groaning and swaying, and creaking as the breath
of the Lord passed over them.

And the three old people kneeling by their smouldering fireside, amid
the general uproar, Zephaniah began in the words of a prayer which Moses
the man of God made long ago under the shadows of Egyptian pyramids:
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in