med to giddy heights, and his head had never turned as he
looked down the cliffs at Saint Winifred's, or the valleys at home. But
his heart began to beat very fast with the painful sense that every step
which he accomplished was dangerous, and that the nerve which would
readily have borne him through a brief effort would here have to be
sustained for fully twenty minutes, which would be the least possible
time in which he could make the transit. The loneliness, too, was
frightful; in three minutes he was out of sight of his friends; and to
be there without a companion, in the very heart of the mighty mountains,
traversing this haunted and terrible path, with not an eye to see him if
he should slip and be dashed to atoms on the unconscious rocks--this
thought almost overmastered him, unmanned him, filled him with a weird
sense of indescribable horror. He battled against it with all his
might, but it came on him like a foul harpy again and again, sickening
his whole soul, making his forehead glisten with the damp dews of
anticipated death. At last he came to a stunted willow which had
twisted its dry roots into the thin soil, and, clinging to the stem of
it with both arms, he was forced to stop and close his eyes, and praying
for God's help, he summoned together all the faculties of his soul, and
buffeted this ghastly intruder away so thoroughly that it did not again
return. As a man might shoot a vulture, and look at it lying dead at
his feet, so with the arrow of a heartfelt supplication Walter slew the
hideous imagination that had been flapping its wings over him; nor did
he stir again till he was sure that it had lost its power. And then,
opening his eyes, he bore steadily and cautiously on, till all of a
sudden, in the fast fading sunlight, something glinted white in the
valley beneath his feet. In a moment it flashed upon him that this was
the unreached skeleton a thousand feet below, the sight of which
imparted a superstitious horror to the Devil's Way, as the peasants
called the narrow path along the Razor. Nor was this all: for some rags
of the man's dress, torn off by his headlong fall, still fluttered on a
stump of blackthorn not thirty feet below. And now, again, the poor
boy's heart quailed with an uncontrollable emotion of physical and
mental fear. For a moment he tottered, every nerve was loosened, his
legs bent under him, and, dropping down on his knees, he clutched the
ground with both hands. It