So they unbolted the lee-door, and worked out into the snow. Then poor Laura, with the child, crept round into the storm. Heavens! how it raged and howled! Where was her poor bridegroom now? She seized up Tom, and turned her back to the wind, and worked along, go,--step sideway, sideway, the only way she could by step,--did it ever seem so far before? Tommy was crying. "One minute more, dear boy. Tommy shall see the other lantern. And Tommy shall carry mamma's great scissors up the stairs. Don't cry, my darling, don't cry." Here is the door;--just as she began to wonder if she were dreaming or crazy. Not so badly drifted in as she feared. At least she is under cover. "Up-a-day, my darling, up-a-day. One, two, what a many steps for Tommy! That's my brave boy." And they were on the lantern deck again, fairly rocking in the gale,--and Laura was chopping away on her stiff wicks, and pumping up her oil again, and filling the receivers, as if she had ever done it till this Christmas before. And she kept saying over to herself,-- "Then those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps." "And I will light them," said she aloud. "That will save another walk at sundown. And I know these carcels run at least five hours." So she struck a match, and with some little difficulty coaxed the fibres to take fire. The yellow light flared luridly on the white snow-flakes, and yet it dazzled her and Tommy as it flashed on them from the reflectors. "Will anybody see it, mamma?" said the child. "Will papa see it?" And just then the witching devil who manages the fibres of memory, drew from the little crypt in Laura's brain, where they had been stored unnoticed years upon years, four lines of Leigh Hunt's, and the child saw that she was Hero:-- "Then at the flame a torch of fire she lit, And, o'er her head anxiously holding it, Ascended to the roof, and, leaning there, Lifted its light into the darksome air." If only the devil would have been satisfied with this. But of course she could not remember that, without remembering Schiller:-- "In the gale her torch is blasted, Beacon of the hoped-for strand: Horror broods above the waters, Horror broods above the land." And she said aloud to the boy, "Our torch shall not go out, Tommy,--come down, come down, darling, with mamma." But all through the day horrid lines from the same poem came back to her. Why did she ever learn it! Why, but because dear Tom gave her the book himself; and this was his own version, as he sent it to her from the camp in the valley,-- "Yes, 'tis he! although he perished, Still his sacred troth he cherished." "Why did Tom write it for me?" "And they trickle, lightly playing O'er a corpse upon the sand."