for one
evening at least of freedom from his obsession.

We were away before daylight, and I never saw Uncle Rube again. Life,
it seems, went along tranquilly with him the following winter. As
usual he kept his watch and ward on the cliffs by the Red Island
Shoals. Then the fatal 10th of April came round. Once again it broke
upon the solitary figure of the old man straining his eyes from his
coign of vantage on the dread shoals of the Red Islands.
Unquestionably he saw again reenacted there the weird tragedy that
nearly half a century before had broken his life, bringing home with a
strange fascination the moving picture to his very heart. But with it
this spring he witnessed also a scene that for many years every man on
the coast had prayed for, but no man had been privileged to take part
in. The wind had come out of the Straits and the Gulf ice was driving
swiftly towards the great Atlantic, exactly as it had done on the
memorable day now forty years before. Once again there was ice in huge
sheets jammed against the great cliffs of Belle Isle, and clear water
between. Suddenly the straining eyes of the old sailor shone with a
totally new light. He jumped to his feet, and with hands shading his
starting eyes, stood motionless like a statue on the pedestal of his
lookout, now white as the purest marble in its winter mantle.

Was it age? Or the final break-up of his mind? No, neither--he was
certain of it. There were black things moving on the white ice, and
driving with it once more, just as the Manxman had, straight for the
shoals of the Red Islands. Nearer and nearer they came. There could be
no doubt now. They moved. They could be no land debris, no shadows
from the rafted ice sheets. So quickly was the floe running that just
as he remembered it, before anything could be done, clip! and the
advancing edge had again struck the standing ice, and woe betide
anything that was in or on it, anywhere near the line of contact. As a
dazed mouse watches the cat that is toying with it, the rigid figure
on the hilltop gazed at the impending tragedy--too far off for his
material brain correctly to interpret the image on his actual retina.
He was seeing, though he failed to realize it, the same impress that
emotion had recorded on the tablets of his very soul.

The realism of it was too much for human nature, and Uncle Rube, his
hands covering his face, started running homewards over the familiar
pathway he had trodden so ofte