n yet more
Elsley's wild angry brain, till he tries to add his shouts to the
great battle-cries of land and sea, and finds them as little audible
as an infant's wail.

Suddenly, far below him, a bright glimmer;--and, in a moment, a
blue-light reveals the whole scene, in ghastly hues,--blue leaping
breakers, blue weltering sheets of foam, blue rocks, crowded with blue
figures, like ghosts, flitting to and fro upon the brink of that blue
seething Phlegethon, and rushing up towards him through the air, a
thousand flying blue foam-sponges, which dive over the brow of the
hill and vanish, like delicate fairies fleeing before the wrath of the
gale:--but where is the wreck? The blue-light cannot pierce the grey
veil of mingled mist and spray which hangs to seaward; and her guns
have been silent for half an hour and more.

Elsley hurries down, and finds half the village collected on the
long sloping point of down below. Sailors wrapped in pilot-cloth,
oil-skinned coast-guardsmen, women with their gowns turned over their
heads, staggering restlessly up and down, and in and out, while every
moment some fresh comer stumbles down the slope, thrusting himself
into his clothes as he goes, and asks, "Where's the wreck!" and gets
no answer, but a surly advice to "hold his noise," as if they had hope
of hearing the wreck which they cannot see; and kind women, with their
hearts full of mothers' instincts, declare that they can hear little
children crying, and are pooh-poohed down by kind men, who, man's
fashion, don't like to believe anything too painful, or, if they
believe it, to talk of it.

"What were the guns from, then, Brown?" asks the Lieutenant of the
head-boatman.

"Off the Chough and Crow, I thought, sir. God grant not!"

"You thought, sir!" says the great man, willing to vent his vexation
on some one. "_Why_ didn't you make sure?"

"Why, just look, Lieutenant," says Brown, pointing into the "blank
height of the dark;" "and I was on the pier too, and couldn't see; but
the look-out man here says--" A shift of wind, a drift of cloud, and
the moon flashes out a moment.--"There she is, sir!"

Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long curved black line,
beautiful, severe, and still, amid those white wild leaping hills.
A murmur from the crowd, which swells into a roar, as they surge
aimlessly up and down.

Another moment, and it is cut in two by a white
line--covered--lost--all hold their breaths. No; the sea passe