tself thus, the simple face grew suddenly
blank, and the gray eyes looked out of their dark hollows as if the
world were empty and he alone lived to tell the tale.

M. Jacobus had a watchful keeper; she was never far off; she put her
hand on his shoulder now with,--

"What do you look for at sea, Jerome?"--speaking cheerfully, and in his
own tongue.

He did not turn his head until he thought he had put all his trouble out
of sight.

"I pursue your Captain's fancy," he said. "_I_ find in the sea but muddy
water, with power to bring rage and destruction for no cause. I find
great treasures lying useless below, starving men sailing above,--great
pain, death every day,--the baby washed from its mother's arms, the
husband from the wife. The good Captain sees a loving God behind all
these: my eyes are not so clear."

She pushed the lattice farther open.

"It is a strong sea for December," was all she said. "The tides run
higher later, usually."

"Everyman makes his own God and heaven," maundered on the Professor, in
a set, monotonous voice, "out of his individual animal or mental needs.
The Southern European surrounds Him with virgins, paradise, and music;
and the cold Scotchman gives us a magnified shadow of his own grim face,
gracious and merciful only to his own petty clan."

Mrs. Jacobus did not reply. It was an old tale to her ears, perhaps; she
remembered it croaked by his father with a venomous zest; but Jerome
repeated it with a stolid apathy, like one who asked for bread in life,
and they gave him but this stone.

"Come down on the beach," she said. "There are curious bits of wreck
washed ashore to-day, they tell me: broken sea-weeds from far-off
coasts, unknown here; and small shell-fish coming into shoal water for
safety, that never ventured so far inland in the memory of any of the
wreckers. Come look at this sky, Jerome: how rapidly it has changed!"

M. Jacobus thrust out his head with an assumption of sagacity.

"It was there that Captain Lufflin warned me the danger lay," said his
wife, pointing to a mere fleck of quiet and black in the northeast,
which remained immovably solid while the whole heaven around was broken
into drifting frightened masses. Beneath, (yet not far beneath, for
ocean and sky to-day seemed like gray, fast-approaching planes,) the
angry roar of the waves and the tossing of yellow frothy caps had been
suddenly quelled into the vast silence which rose and fell in slowly
darkeni