of the structure, awoke him. He leaped to his feet, and into an
inch of water! By the flickering firelight he could see it oozing
and dripping from the crevices of the logs and broadening into a
pool by the chimney. A scrap of paper torn from an envelope was
floating idly on its current. Was it the overflow of the backed-up
waters of the river? He was not left long in doubt. Another blow
upon the gable of the house, and a torrent of spray leaped down the
chimney, scattered the embers far and wide, and left him in utter
darkness. Some of the spray clung to his lips. It was salt. The
great ocean had beaten down the river bar and was upon him!

Was there aught to fly to? No! The cabin stood upon the highest
point of the sand spit, and the low swale on one side crossed by
his late visitors was a seething mass of breakers, while the
estuary behind him was now the ocean itself. There was nothing to
do but to wait.

The very helplessness of his situation was, to a man of his
peculiar temperament, an element of patient strength. The instinct
of self-preservation was still strong in him, but he had no fear of
death, nor, indeed, any presentiment of it; yet if it came, it was
an easy solution of the problem that had been troubling him, and it
wiped off the slate! He thought of the sarcastic prediction of his
cousin, and death in the form that threatened him was the
obliteration of his home and even the ground upon which it stood.
There would be nothing to record, no stain could come upon the
living. The instinct that kept him true to HER would tell her how
he died; if it did not, it was equally well. And with this simple
fatalism his only belief, this strange man groped his way to his
bed, lay down, and in a few moments was asleep. The storm still