“He soon caught sight of the maiden.  She was leaning, half fainting, against the precipice.  She had beard her lover’s last cry, and, although it had conveyed no suggestion of his voice to her ear, she trembled from head to foot, and her limbs would bear her no farther.  He checked his speed, rode gently up to her, lifted her unresisting, laid her across the shoulders of his horse, and, riding carefully till he reached a more open path, dashed again wildly along the mountain side.  The lady’s long hair was shaken loose, and dropped, trailing on the ground.  The horse trampled upon it, and stumbled, half dragging her from the saddle-bow.  He caught her, lifted her up, and looked at her face.  She was dead.  I suppose he went mad.  He laid her again across the saddle before him, and rode on, reckless whither.  Horse, and man, and maiden were found the next day, lying at the foot of a cliff, dashed to pieces.  It was observed that a hind shoe of the horse was loose and broken.  Whether this had been the cause of his fall, could not be told; but ever when he races, as race he will, till the day of doom, along that mountain side, his gallop is mingled with the clank of the loose and broken shoe.  For, like the sin, the punishment is awful; he shall carry about for ages the phantom-body of the girl, knowing that her soul is away, sitting with the soul of his brother, down in the deep ravine, or scaling with him the topmost crags of the towering mountain peaks.  There are some who, from time to time, see the doomed man careering along the face of the mountain, with the lady hanging across the steed; and they say it always betokens a storm, such as this which is now raving about us.”

I had not noticed till now, so absorbed had I been in her tale, that the storm had risen to a very ecstasy of fury.

“They say, likewise, that the lady’s hair is still growing; for, every time they see her, it is longer than before; and that now such is its length and the headlong speed of the horse, that it floats and streams out behind, like one of those curved clouds, like a comet’s tail, far up in the sky; only the cloud is white, and the hair dark as night.  And they say it will go on growing until the Last Day, when the horse will falter, and her hair will gather in; and the horse will fall, and the hair will twist, and twine, and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her.  Then the body will rise up within it, face to face with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will drag him down to the bottomless pit.”