trangely penetrated. Rugged and worn, it raised its huge breast
against wind and wave, secure upon a broad pedestal, which probably
extended as far beneath the sea as the massive column itself rose above
it. Rising thus, with its shaggy drapery of seaweed clinging about its
knees, it seemed to be a motionless but sentient being--some monster of
the deep, a Titan of the ocean condemned ever to front in silence the
fury of that illimitable and rarely-travelled sea. Yet--silent and
motionless as he was--the hoary ancient gave hint of the mysteries of
his revenge. Standing upon the broad and sea-girt platform where surely
no human foot but his had ever stood in life, the convict saw, many feet
above him, pitched into a cavity of the huge sun-blistered boulders, an
object which his sailor eye told him at once was part of the top hamper
of some large ship. Crusted with shells, and its ruin so overrun with
the ivy of the ocean that its ropes could barely be distinguished from
the weeds with which they were encumbered, this relic of human labour
attested the triumph of nature over human ingenuity. Perforated below by
the relentless sea, exposed above to the full fury of the tempest; set
in solitary defiance to the waves, that rolling from the ice-volcano of
the Southern Pole, hurled their gathered might unchecked upon its iron
front, the great rock drew from its lonely warfare the materials of its
own silent vengeance. Clasped in iron arms, it held its prey, snatched
from the jaws of the all-devouring sea. One might imagine that, when the
doomed ship, with her crew of shrieking souls, had splintered and gone
down, the deaf, blind giant had clutched this fragment, upheaved from
the seething waters, with a thrill of savage and terrible joy.

John Rex, gazing up at this memento of a forgotten agony, felt a
sensation of the most vulgar pleasure. "There's wood for my fire!"
thought he; and mounting to the spot, he essayed to fling down the
splinters of timber upon the platform. Long exposed to the sun, and
flung high above the water-mark of recent storms, the timber had dried
to the condition of touchwood, and would burn fiercely. It was precisely
what he required. Strange accident that had for years stored, upon a
desolate rock, this fragment of a vanished and long-forgotten vessel,
that it might aid at last to warm the limbs of a villain escaping from
justice!

Striking the disintegrated mass with his iron-shod heel, John Rex brok