cry right out,—­I was so shaky.  And Seth he was about as scart as ef he’d seen the dead, havin’ heerd up to Avon, fifteen year ago nearly, that the Lowisy Miles had been run down off the Sandwich Islands by a British man-of-war, and all hands lost, exceptin’ one o’ the boys.  However, he come to his bearin’s after a while, and told me about our folks, and how’t Hetty Buel wasn’t married, but keepin’ deestrict school, and her old grandmother alive yet.

“Well, I kinder heartened up, and agreed to take passage with Seth.—­Good Lord, Doctor! what’s that?”

A peculiar and oppressive stillness had settled down on everything in and out of the hospital while Jackson was going on with his story.  I noticed it only as the hush of a tropic midnight; but as he spoke, I heard—­apparently out on the prairie—­a heavy jarring sound like repeated blows, drawing nearer and nearer the building.

Jackson sprung upright on his pillows, the hectic passed from either gaunt and sallow cheek, leaving the red and blue tattoo marks visible in most ghastly distinctness, while the sweat poured in drops down his hollow temples.

The noise drew still nearer.  All the patients in the ward awoke and quitted their beds, hastily.  The noise was at hand,—­blows of great violence and power; and a certain malign rapidity shook the walls from one end of the hospital to the other,—­blow upon blow, like the fierce attacks of a catapult, only with no like result.  The nurse, a German Catholic, fell on his knees and told his beads, glancing over his shoulder in undisguised horror; the patients cowered together, groaning and praying; and I could hear the stir and confusion in the ward below.  In less than a minute’s space the singular sound passed through the house, and in hollow, jarring echoes died out toward the bay.

I looked at Eben;—­his jaw had fallen; his hands were rigid and locked together; his eyes were rolled upward, fixed and glassy; a stream of scarlet blood trickled over his gray beard from the corner of his mouth;—­he was dead!  As I laid him back on the pillow and turned to restore some quiet to the ward, a Norther came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon’s track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to temperate zone.

Vainly did I endeavor to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds.  Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, by the appearance of the extra nurse I had sent for, to perform the last offices for Jackson, that he was dead, a renewed and irrepressible horror attacked them, and it was broad day before composure or stillness was regained in any part of the building except my own rooms, to which I betook myself as soon as possible, and slept till sunrise, too soundly for any mystical visitation whatever to have disturbed my rest.