t he sat on the narrow ledge of a rock, while
the angry waves thundered beneath, and cast their cold spray every
instant over him. With the ebbing of the tide, the sea receded from the
cavern; but Frank hesitated to attempt crossing the chasm again; his
limbs had become stiff and benumbed, and his long abstinence had so
weakened his powers that he shrank from the dangerous enterprise. While
giving way to the most desponding reflections, a stentorian hilloa rang
and echoed through the cavern; and never had the human voice sounded so
sweetly in his ear. He replied to it with a thrilling shout of joy, and,
in a few minutes, several persons with torches appeared advancing. A
plank was speedily thrust across the fissure, and Frank Costello once
more found himself amid a group of his friends, who were warmly
congratulating him upon his miraculous escape. They told him that, from
his not having returned home the preceding night, it was generally
concluded that he had been drowned, and a party of his neighbors
proceeded in a boat, early in the morning, in search of his body. On
reaching "Puffin Hole," they discovered his boat fastened to a rock, and
full of water, as she had remained on the ebbing of the tide. This
circumstance induced them to examine the cavern narrowly, and the happy
result of their search is already known.

ADVENTURE WITH A COBRA DI CAPELLO

I might have slept some four or five hours, and a dreamless and
satisfying sleep it was; but certain it is--let scholiasts say what they
will, and skeptics throw doubts by handfulls on the assertions of
metaphysicians--that, before I awoke, and in my dreamless slumber, I had
a visible perception of peril--a consciousness of the hovering presence
of death! How to describe my feelings I know not; but, as we have all
read and heard that, if the eyes of a watcher are steadily fixed on the
countenance of a sleeper for a certain length of time, the slumberer
will be sure to start up--wakened by the mysterious magnetism of a
recondite principle of clairvoyance; so it was that, with shut eyes and
drowsed-up senses, an inward ability was conferred upon me to detect the
living from the presence of danger near me--to see, though sleep-blind,
the formless shape of a mysterious horror crouching beside me; and, as
if the peril that was my nightmate was of a nature to be quickened into
fatal activity by any motion on my part, I felt in my very stupor the
critical necessity of lyin