rpents, and
insects gasped for breath. The fish below the sea, the animated nature
above, and the very leaves and vines of the forests and thickets knew
what was brewing in the great vacuum around.

Slowly and painfully the man in the chapel regained his feet, and with
the child by the hand, moved on to the farthest corner by the rude
altar, where he sank down again, and, clasping the boy to his heart,
waited in breathless awe. As if the powder and flames had not done their
destructive work, the wrath of heaven was to be poured out over the
devoted den of the pirates.

Then came a bellowing roar as a current of wind swept over the sea,
cutting a pathway in the blue water, and scooping it up in an impalpable
mist, hurrying on to the low beach of the island, and tearing the sand
and shells up in heaps--and then a lull. Now, as if all the demons of
winds had let loose their cavernous lungs from the four quarters of the
earth, and like the shocks of artillery, volley upon volley, came the
hurricane. The sea became one boiling, seething, hissing surface of
foam, pressed and flattened by the weight of the tempest, which laid the
black rocks bare on the ledge, and drove the water into both mouths of
the inlet, until, with a crashing shock, it met in the basin, and broke
over and over the cove, and high up the wall of rocks on the other side.
Two or three streams of whirlwind meeting, too, over the island, drove
the lagoon hither and thither, catching up the white pond-lilies by
their long stems, twisting off the dense thickets of mangroves by the
roots, burrowing holes in the sandy beds of the cactus, and shearing off
their flat, thorny leaves and needle points by the acre together; then a
rushing whirl around the cocoa-nuts, bowing their tufted tops at first
till they nearly touched the earth, when, the stout trunks snapping like
glass, they would go pitching and tossing from base to crown, careering
and dancing aloft, borne away with sand and mangrove, cactus, flowers,
and sticks, into the flying clouds before the hurricane. Then another
lull; and from the opposite direction again thundered the terrible
breath of the demons, sweeping thousands of sea-birds, with broken
pinions, screaming amid the gale, hurling them against the crag,
stripping the feathers from their crushed carcasses, and in a moment
burying them a foot deep in clouds of sand. No more pauses or lulls now
in the hurtling tempest; but with a steady, tremendou