The being whom he addressed had stood for all this while as though bereft of speech and of movement, but at these last words he appeared to find his voice, for he gave forth a strident bellow of so dreadful and terrible a sort that the Collector, brave as he found himself, stepped back a pace or two before it.  The next instant he was struck upon the wrist as though by a bolt of lightning, and the snuffbox, describing a yellow circle against the light of the door, disappeared into the darkness of the night beyond.  Ere he could recover himself another blow smote him upon the breast, and he fell headlong from the platform, as through infinite space.

* * * * *

The next day the Collector did not present himself at the office at his accustomed hour, and the morning wore along without his appearing at his desk.  By noon serious alarm began to take possession of the community, and about two o’clock, the tide being then set out pretty strong, Mr. Tompkins, the consumptive clerk, and two sailors from the Sarah Goodrich, then lying at Mr. Hoppins’s wharf, went down in a yawl-boat to learn, if possible, what had befallen him.  They coasted along the Point for above a half-hour before they discovered any vestige of the missing Collector.  Then at last they saw him lying at a little distance upon a cobbled strip of beach, where, judging from his position and from the way he had composed himself to rest, he appeared to have been overcome by liquor.

At this place Mr. Tompkins put ashore, and making the best of his way over the slippery stones exposed at low water, came at last to where his chief was lying.  The Collector was reposing with one arm over his eyes, as though to shelter them from the sun, but as soon as Mr. Tompkins had approached close enough to see his countenance, he uttered a great cry that was like a scream.  For, by the blue and livid lips parted at the corners to show the yellow teeth, from the waxy whiteness of the fat and hairy hands—­in short, from the appearance of the whole figure, he was aware in an instant that the Collector was dead.

His cry brought the two sailors running.  They, with the utmost coolness imaginable, turned the Collector over, but discovered no marks of violence upon him, till of a sudden one of them called attention to the fact that his neck was broke.  Upon this the other opined that he had fallen among the rocks and twisted his neck.

The two mariners then made an investigation of his pockets, the clerk standing by the while paralyzed with horror, his face the color of dough, his scalp creeping, and his hands and fingers twitching as though with the palsy.  For there was something indescribably dreadful in the spectacle of those living hands searching into the dead’s pockets, and he would freely have given a week’s pay if he had never embarked upon the expedition for the recovery of his chief.

In the Collector’s pockets they found a twist of tobacco, a red bandanna handkerchief of violent color, a purse meagrely filled with copper coins and silver pieces, a silver watch still ticking with a loud and insistent iteration, a piece of tarred string, and a clasp-knife.