“Beautiful! wonderful!” he murmured, as the lightning fiercely shot over us, and the roar died away in long billows of heavy sound.

Afterwards he told me he had the same unbounded delight in a great storm as he had at the foot of Niagara, or in looking at the stars on a winter night:  that it stirred in his soul all that was loftiest,—­that for the time he could comprehend Deity, and that “the noise of the thundering of His waters” was an anthem that struck the highest chords of his nature.  What is really sublime takes us out of ourselves, so that we have no room for personal terror, and we mingle with the elemental roar in spirit as with something kindred to us.  I guessed this, and meditated on it, while I stopped my ears and shut my eyes and trembled with overwhelming terror myself.  Clearly, I am a coward, in spite of my admiration of the sublime.  The Dominie, being as good as he is great, does not require a woman to be sublime, luckily; and I think, as I like him all the better for his strength, he really does not object to a moderate amount of weakness on my part, which is unaffected and not to be helped.  When animal magnetism becomes a science, it will be seen why some spirits revel and soar, and some cower and shrink, at the same amount of electricity.  So the Dominie says now; and then—­he said nothing.

XV.

In the fright, excitement, and thorough wetting, I forgot about the boat,—­or rather, no misgiving seized me as to its safety.  But, on coming to breakfast the next morning, we felt that there was a great commotion in the house.  Everybody was out on the piazza, and a crowd was gathered a short distance off.  Somebody had taken off the doors from the south entrance, and there was a sort of procession already formed on each side of these two doors.  We went out in front of the house to listen to a rough fisherman who described the storm in which the little boat capsized.  He had stood on the shore and just finished fastening his own boat, for he well knew the signs of the storm, when he caught sight of the little sail scudding with lightning-speed to the landing.  Suddenly it stopped short, shook all over as if in an ague, and capsized in an instant.  The storm broke, and although he tried to discern some traces of the boat or its occupants, nothing could be seen but the white foam on the black water, glistening like a shark’s teeth when he has seized his prey.  In the early morning he had found two bodies on the sand.  The water, he said, must have tossed them with considerable force,—­yet not against the rocks at all, for they were not disfigured, nor their clothing much torn.  As the man ceased relating the story, the bodies were brought past us, covered by a piano-cloth which somebody had considerately snatched up and taken to the shore.  They were placed in the long parlor on a table.

My husband beckoned to me to come to him.  Turning down the cloth, he showed me the faces I dreamily expected to see.  I don’t know when I thought of it, but suppose I recognized the air and movement so familiar, even in the distant dimness.  No matter how clearly and fully death is expected, when it comes it is with a death-shock,—­how much more, coming as this did, as if with a bolt from the clear sky!