Her yellow hair, blown wild and wide,
Streamed like a meteor o’er the tide;
  Her set white face yet whiter grew,
As lashed by furious flood and rain,
Still for the bridge, with might and main,
  Her gallant horse swam, straight and true! 
They gained the track, and slowly crept
Timber by timber, torrents swept,
  Across the boiling hell of water—­
Till past the torn and shuddering bridge
He bore her to the safer ridge,
  The engineer’s intrepid daughter!

The night was falling wild and black,
The waters blotted out the track;
  She gave her flying horse free rein,
For full a dreadful mile away
The lonely wayside station lay,
And hoarse above his startled neigh
  She heard the thunder of the train! 
“What if they meet this side the goal?”
She thought with sick and shuddering soul;
For well she knew what doom awaited
A fell mischance—­a step belated—­
The grinding wheels, the yawning dyke—­
Sure death for her—­for them—­alike!

Like danger-lamps her blue eyes glowed,
As thro’ the whirling gloom she rode,
  Her laboring breath drawn sharply in;
Pitted against yon rushing wheels
Were tireless grit and trusty heels,
  And with God’s favor they might win! 
And soon along the perilous line
Flamed out the lurid warning sign,
While round her staggering horse the crowd
Surged with wild cheers and plaudits loud.—­
And this is how, thro’ flood and rain,
Brave Kate McCarthy saved the train!

OFF THE SKIDLOE.

With leagues of wasteful water ringed about,
And wrapped in sheeted foam from base to peak,
A sheer, stupendous monolith, wrought out
By the slow, ceaseless labor of the deeps,
In awful isolation, old as Time,
The gray, forbidding Rock of Skidloe stands—­
Breasting the wild incursions of the North—­
The grim antagonist of a thousand waves!

Far to the leeward, faintly drawn against
A dim perspective of perpetual storms,
A frowning line of black basaltic cliffs
Baffles the savage onset of the surf. 
But, rolled in cloud and foam, old Skidloe lifts
His dark, defiant head forever mid
The shock and thunder of contending tides,
And fixed, immovable as fate, hurls back
The rude, eternal protest of the sea!

Colossal waters coil about his feet,
Deep rooted in the awful gulfs between
The measureless walls of mountain chains submerged;
An infinite hoarse murmur wells from all
His dim mysterious crypts and corridors: 
The inarticulate mutterings that voice
The ancient secret of the mighty main.