er huddled in his chair by the table,
with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food
for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old
Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.

V

The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went
noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It
did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the
window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a
great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out,
had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and
heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at
the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp,
slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like
a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought
before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea;
every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of
the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet
our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred
paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would
have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with
abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there
presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated,
with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house,
ah-o-oy!"

It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house--about
two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in
fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a
pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping
dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged
hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering
columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked
soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that
brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another
wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves,
ah-o-oy!"

I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to
him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not
chanced at that