'Twas a strange scene to witness, let me tell you; never can I forget the sightless, thinking sort of gaze from that head of his, after the telescope sank from his eye, when the Conqueror must have shot back with all her stately hamper into the floor of the Atlantic again! Once more I brought my spyglass to bear on the place where he had been, and was almost on the point of calling out to warn him off the edge of the cliff, forgetting the distance I was away. Napoleon had stepped, with one foot before him, on the very brink, his two hands hanging loose by his side, with the glass in one of them, till the shadow of his small black cocked hat covered the hollows of his eyes, and he stood as it were looking down past the face of the precipice. What he thought of no mortal tongue can say, whether he was master at the time over a wilder battle than any he'd ever fought--but just then, what was the surprise it gave me to see the head of a man, with a red tasselled cap on it, raised through amongst the ivy from below, while he seemed to have his feet on the cracks and juts of the rock, hoisting himself by one hand round the tangled roots, till no doubt he must have looked right aloft into the French Emperor's face; and perhaps he whispered something,--though, for my part, it was all dumb-show to me, where I knelt peering into the glass. I saw even _him_ start at the suddenness of the thing--he raised his head upright, still glancing down over the front of the crag, with the spread hand lifted, and the side of his face half turned toward the party within earshot behind, where the Governor and the rest apparently kept together out of respect, no doubt watching both Napoleon's back and the ship of war far beyond. The keen sunlight on the spot brought out every motion of the two in front--the _one_ so full in my view, that I could mark his look settle again on the other below, his firm lips parting and his hand out before him, like a man seeing a spirit he knew; while a bunch of leaves on the end of a wand came stealing up from the stranger's post to Napoleon's very fingers. The head of the man on the cliff turned round seaward for one moment, ticklish as his footing must have been; then he looked back, pointing with his loose hand to the horizon--there was one minute between them without a motion, seemingly--the captive Emperor's chin was sunk on his breast, though you'd have said his eyes glanced up out of the shadow on his forehead; and the stranger's red cap hung like a bit of the bright-coloured cliff, under his two hands holding amongst the leaves. Then I saw Napoleon lift his hand calmly, he gave a sign with it--it might have been refusing, it might have been agreeing, or it might be farewell, I never expect to know; but he folded his arms across his breast, with the bunch of leaves in his fingers, and stepped slowly back from the brink toward the officers. I was watching the stranger below it, as he swung there