listless oar. And so the second winter of his hermitage drew near
its close, and with it came a storm that passed into local history,
and is still remembered. It uprooted giant trees along the river,
and with them the tiny rootlets of the life he was idly fostering.

The morning had been fitfully turbulent, the wind veering several
points south and west, with suspicions lulls, unlike the steady
onset of the regular southwest trades. High overhead the long
manes of racing cirro stratus streamed with flying gulls and
hurrying water-fowl; plover piped incessantly, and a flock of
timorous sand-pipers sought the low ridge of his cabin, while a
wrecking crew of curlew hastily manned the uprooted tree that
tossed wearily beyond the bar. By noon the flying clouds huddled
together in masses, and then were suddenly exploded in one vast
opaque sheet over the heavens. The sea became gray, and suddenly
wrinkled and old. There was a dumb, half-articulate cry in the
air,--rather a confusion of many sounds, as of the booming of
distant guns, the clangor of a bell, the trampling of many waves,
the creaking of timbers and soughing of leaves, that sank and fell
ere you could yet distinguish them. And then it came on to blow.
For two hours it blew strongly. At the time the sun should have
set the wind had increased; in fifteen minutes darkness shut down,
even the white sands lost their outlines, and sea and shore and sky
lay in the grip of a relentless and aggressive power.

Within his cabin, by the leaping light of his gusty fire, North sat
alone. His first curiosity passed, the turmoil without no longer
carried his thought beyond its one converging centre. SHE had come
to him on the wings of the storm, even as she had been borne to him
on the summer fog-cloud. Now and then the wind shook the cabin,