ould not have told me on't till after the wakes, if I had
not seen it."

The old man looked as if he had seen a ghost. The whispers he had
heard were, foolishly enough perhaps, connected in his mind with the
presence of this mysterious thing.

"Take it back--back, wench, into the chest again. It was not for thee,
hussy. A prize I fished up with the nets to-day."

"From the sea. Oh me! it is--it is unholy spoil. It has been dragged
from some wreck. Cast it again to the greedy waters. They yield not
their prey without a perilous struggle," said the girl.

The fisherman was silent. He looked thoughtful and disturbed, while
Katherine went back to put the treasure into its hiding-place.

"I wonder what that whispering could be?" thought the maiden, as she
opened the old chest. Ere the lid was pulled down, she cast one look
at the beautiful but forbidden intruder, and she was sure--but
imagination is a potent wizard, and works marvellously--else she was
sure that a slight movement was visible beneath the casket. She flung
down the lid in great terror; pale and trembling, she sprang out of
the room, and sat down silent and alarmed. Again the mysterious
whispers were audible in the momentary pauses of the blast.

"Save us!" said the elder female; "I hear it again."

Bounce flew open the door of the bed-chamber, and--in stalked their
dumb assistant, as though he had chosen this mode of ingress, through
the window of the sleeping-room, rather than through the house-door.

"Plague take thee! Where hast thou been?" said the old woman, partly
relieved from her terrors. Yet was the whispering precisely as
incomprehensible as before. The dumb menial that stood before her was
obviously incapable even of this act of incipient speech.

"Where hast thou been, Dick?" inquired Grimes, seriously. But the
former pointed towards the beach.

"How long hast thou been yonder?--in the chamber, I mean."

Dick here fell into one of his ordinary fits of abstraction, from
which neither menace nor entreaty could arouse him. As the old man
turned from the window he saw a blaze of light flashing suddenly upon
the wall. The yard was filled with smoke. Rushing forth, the inmates
found the barn thatch on fire, kindled probably by the lightning. The
rain prevented it from extending with much rapidity; and Grimes,
mounting on the roof, soon extinguished the burning materials before
much damage had been the result. Misfortunes verily seemed to crow