The agony of finding myself irretrievably gone--the dazzle and the flash of the water as it closed over my head--the thousand regrets that whirled through my brain during the brief moment that I was below the surface--the struggle of renewed hope as I rose again and beheld the blue sky and the fair face of nature, are all as deeply graven on my memory as if the whole had occurred but yesterday. Although all panting when I got my head above the water, I succeeded in uttering a loud shout for assistance, while I struggled to keep myself up with my hand; but as I had never learned to swim, I soon sunk again, and on rising a second time, my strength was so far gone, I could but give voice to a feeble cry, though I saw myself drifting quickly towards the mill and the waterfall, where death seemed inevitable. My only hope was that the miller would hear me; but to my dismay, I found that my call, though uttered with all the power I had left, was far too faint to rise above the roar of the cascade and the clatter of the mill-wheels. Hope gave way, and ceasing to struggle, I was letting myself sink, when I caught a faint glimpse of some one running down amongst the rocks towards me, but at that moment, in spite of my renewed efforts, the water overwhelmed me again. For an instant there was an intolerable sense of suffocation--a ringing in my ears, and a flashing of light in my eyes that was very dreadful, but it passed quickly away, and a sweet dreamy sensation came over me, as if I had been walking in green fields, I did not well know where--the fear and the struggle were all gone, and, gradually losing remembrance of everything, I seemed to fall asleep. Such is all that my memory has preserved of the sensations I experienced in drowning--a death generally considered a very dreadful one, but which is, in reality, anything but painful. We have no means of judging what is suffered in almost any other manner of passing from the world; but were I to speak from what I myself felt in the circumstances I have detailed, I should certainly say that _it is the fear that is the death_. My next remembrance is of a most painful tingling, spreading itself through every part of my body, even to my very heart, without any other consciousness of active being, till at length, opening my eyes, I found myself lying in a large barely furnished room in the mill, with a multitude of faces gazing at me, some strange and some familiar, amongst the last of which I perceived the pimpled nose of the old _maître d'hôtel_, and the mild countenance of Father Francis of Allurdi.