crifice of Balthazar. It was the
forerunner of the hurricane, which had chased it from the bed where it had
been sleeping, since the warm and happy noon-tide. Ten thousand chariots
at their speed could not have equalled the rumbling that succeeded, when
the winds came booming over the lake. As if too eager to permit anything
within their fangs to escape, they brought with them a wild, dull light,
which filled while it clouded the atmosphere, and which, it was scarcely
fanciful to imagine, had been hurried down, in their vortex, from those
chill glaciers, where they had so long been condensing their forces for
the present descent. The waves were not increased, but depressed by the
pressure of this atmospheric column, though it took up hogshead, of water
from their crests, scattering it in fine penetrating spray, till the
entire space between the heavens and the earth seemed saturated with its
particles.

The Winkelried received the shock at a moment when the lee-side of her
broad deck was wallowing in the trough, and its weather was protruded on
the summit of a swell. The wind howled when it struck the pent limits, as
if angered at being thwarted, and there was a roar under the wide
gangways, resembling that of lions. The reeling vessel was raised in a
manner to cause those or board to believe it about to be lifted bodily
from the water, but the ceaseless rolling of the element restored the
balance. Maso afterwards affirmed that nothing but this accidental
position, which formed a sort of lee, prevented all in the bark from being
swept from the deck, before the first gust of the hurricane.

Sigismund had heard the heart-rending appeal of Adelheid, and,
notwithstanding the awful strife of the elements and the fearful character
of the night, he alone breasted the shock on his feet. Though aided by a
rope, and bowed like a reed, his herculean frame trembled under the shock,
in a way to render even his ability to resist seriously doubtful. But, the
first blast expended, he sprang to the gangway, and leaped into the
cauldron of the lake unhesitatingly, and yet in the possession of all his
faculties. He was desperately bent on saving a life so dear to Adelheid,
or on dying in the attempt.

Maso had watched the crisis with a seaman's eye, a seaman's resources, and
a seaman's coolness. He had not refused to quit his feet, but kneeling on
one knee, he pressed the tiller down, lashed it, and clinging to the
massive timber, faced