eyes,
I hoped, might turn seaward and not up towards the woods where such
weird sights were to be seen. For this place, the angle of the great
pasture-land where it met the forest, was occupied by sleeping cattle,
white, and still, and frigid, so that all the scene, glimmering in the
moonlight, might have been cut out of some great block of marble; and
cows and sheep, and trees and hills, all chiselled by the hand of
Death. That a living thing should be speaking and moving there seemed
almost an outrage upon the marvellous beauty of that field of sleep.
The imagination reeled before this all-conquering trance, this glory of
nature spellbound. It were as though a man must throw himself to the
earth, do what he would, and surrender to the spell of it. And that,
perchance, we had done, and the end had been there and then, but for a
woman's cry, rising so dolefully in the woods that every impulse was
awakened by it and all our resolutions retaken.

"Did you hear that?" I cried to him, wildly; "a woman's voice, and near
by, too! You'll not turn back now, Captain Nepeen!"

"Not for a fortune!" said he, bravely; "it would be Gertrude Dolling,
the purser's sister; we cannot leave her!"

The desire was like a draught of wine to him. He had been near falling,
I make sure, but now, steadying himself for an instant upon my arm, he
set off running at all his speed, and I at his heels, we crossed the
intervening grass and were in the wood. There we found the purser's
sister, stumbling blindly to and fro, like a woman robbed of sight,
while children were clinging to her dress and crying pitifully because
she did not heed them.

It was an odd scene, and many must come and go before I forget it. Dark
as the wood might be by day, the moonlight seemed to fill every glade
of it, showing us the gnarled trunks and the flowering bushes, the
silent pools and the grassy dells. And in the midst of this sylvan
rest, remote from men, a lonely thicket of the great Pacific Ocean, was
this figure of civilization, a young girl decked out in white, with a
pretty hat that Paris might have sent her, and little children, in
their sailors' clothes, clinging trustingly, as children will in
confidence to a woman's protecting hand. No surprise was it to me then,
nor is it a surprise now, that the girl neither saw nor heard us. The
trance had gripped her surely; the first delirium of exaltation had
robbed her of sight and sense and even knowledge of the c