ghtest
hue. It was a vivid and a gorgeous picture, and I could have looked on
it long with pleasure, when suddenly I felt my arm grasped by a strong
finger. I turned round, and the priest, relaxing his hold, pointed down
into the dark valley below us, as he said in a low and agitated voice--

'You see the light? It is there--there.'

Quickening our pace by every effort, we began rapidly to descend the
mountain by a zigzag road, whose windings soon lost us the view I have
mentioned, and left nothing but the wild and barren mountains around
us. Tired as our poor horse was, the priest pressed him forward; and
regardless of the broken and rugged way he seemed to think of nothing
but his haste, muttering between his teeth with a low but rapid
articulation, while his face grew flushed and pale at intervals, and
his eye had all the lustrous glare and restless look of fever. I
endeavoured, as well as I was able, to occupy my mind with other
thoughts; but with that invincible fascination that turns us ever to
the side we try to shun, I found myself again and again gazing on my
companion's countenance. Every moment now his agitation increased; his
lips were firmly closed, his brow contracted, his cheek flattened and
quivering with a nervous spasm, while his hand trembled violently as he
wiped the big drops of sweat that rolled from his forehead.

At last we reached the level, where a better road presented itself
before us, and enabled us so to increase our speed that we were rapidly
coming up with the light, which, as the evening closed in, seemed larger
and brighter than before. It was now that hour when the twilight seems
fading into night--a grey and sombre darkness colouring every object,
but yet marking grass and rock, pathway and river, with some seeming of
their noonday hues, so that as we came along I could make out the roof
and walls of a mud cabin built against the very mountainside, in the
gable of which the light was shining. A rapid, a momentary thought
flashed across my mind as to what dreary and solitary man could fix his
dwelling-place in such a spot as this, when in an instant the priest
suddenly pulled up the horse, and, stretching out one hand with a
gesture of listening, whispered--

'Hark! Did you not hear that?'

As he spoke, a cry, wild and fearful, rose through the gloomy valley--at
first in one prolonged and swelling note; then broken as if by sobs,
it altered, sank, and rose again wilder and madder,