more he dreamed. He was going to church now, dressed in a suit
of the finest broadcloth, with Minnie on his arm, clothed in pure
white, emblematic, it struck him, of her pure gentle spirit. Friends
were with him, all gaily attired, and very happy, but unaccountably
silent. Perhaps it was the noise of the wedding-bells that rendered
their voices inaudible. He was struck by the solemnity as well as the
pertinacity of these wedding-bells as he entered the church. He was
puzzled too, being a Presbyterian, why he was to be married in
church, but being a man of liberal mind, he made no objection to it.

They all assembled in front of the pulpit, into which the clergyman,
a very reverend but determined man, mounted with a prayer book in
his hand. Ruby was puzzled again. He had not supposed that the pulpit
was the proper place, but modestly attributed this to his ignorance.

"Stop those bells!" said the clergyman, with stern solemnity; but
they went on.

"Stop them, I say!" he roared in a voice of thunder. The sexton,
pulling the ropes in the middle of the church, paid no attention.

Exasperated beyond endurance, the clergyman hurled the prayer book at
the sexton's head, and felled him! Still the bells went on of their
own accord.

"Stop! sto-o-o-o-p! I say," he yelled fiercely, and, hitting the
pulpit with his fist, he split it from top to bottom.

Minnie cried "Shame!" at this, and from that moment the bells ceased.

Whether it was that the fog-bells ceased at that time, or that
Minnie's voice charmed Ruby's thoughts away, we cannot tell, but
certain it is that the severely tried youth became entirely oblivious
of everything. The marriage-party vanished with the bells; Minnie,
alas! faded away also; finally, the roar of the sea round the Bell
Rock, the rock itself, its lighthouse and its inmates, and all
connected with it, faded from the sleeper's mind, and

"like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Left not a wrack behind."

CHAPTER XXXIII

CONCLUSION

Facts are facts; there is no denying that. They cannot be
controverted; nothing can overturn them, or modify them, or set them
aside. There they stand in naked simplicity: mildly contemptuous
alike of sophists and theorists.

Immortal facts! Bacon founded on you; Newton found you out; Dugald
Stewart and all his fraternity reasoned on you, and followed in your
wake. What _would_ this world be without facts? Rest assured, reader,
th