eads run on one
thing and another till you've set my mind a-wandering too. Now, what
should an old woman wish for, when she can go but a step or two before
she comes to her grave? Children, it will haunt me night and day till
I tell you."

"What is it, mother?" cried the husband and wife at once.

Then the old woman, with an air of mystery which drew the circle
closer round the fire, informed them that she had provided her
grave-clothes some years before--a nice linen shroud, a cap with a
muslin ruff, and everything of a finer sort than she had worn since
her wedding-day. But this evening an old superstition had strangely
recurred to her. It used to be said in her younger days that if
anything were amiss with a corpse--if only the ruff were not smooth or
the cap did not set right--the corpse, in the coffin and beneath the
clods, would strive to put up its cold hands and arrange it. The bare
thought made her nervous.

"Don't talk so, grandmother," said the girl, shuddering.

"Now," continued the old woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling
strangely at her own folly, "I want one of you, my children, when your
mother is dressed and in the coffin,--I want one of you to hold a
looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I may take a glimpse at
myself and see whether all's right?"

"Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments," murmured the
stranger-youth. "I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking
and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in
the ocean, that wide and nameless sepulchre?"

For a moment the old woman's ghastly conception so engrossed the minds
of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar
of a blast, had grown broad, deep and terrible before the fated group
were conscious of it. The house and all within it trembled; the
foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound
were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild
glance and remained an instant pale, affrighted, without utterance or
power to move. Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all
their lips:

"The slide! The slide!"

The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable
horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and
sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot, where, in
contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared.
Alas! they had quitted their security and fled right i