But oh, my God, now, as I walked along! think! it flung out of the darkness within pistol shot, clear in the wild blue of a flash of lightning. It stood right in front of me. I was walking straight for it; I should have seen it, without the help of lighting, in a few more strides; the sand went away in a billowy glimmer to the wash of the black water, and a kind of light of its own came up out of it, in which the thing would have shown, had I advanced a few paces. It was a gibbet with a man hanging at the end of the beam, his head coming, according to the picture printed upon my vision by that flash of lightning, within a hand breadth of the piece of timber he dangled at, whence I guessed, with the velocity of thought, that he had been cut down and then tucked up afresh in irons or chains. I came to a stand as though I had been shot, waiting for another glance of lightning to reveal the ghastly object afresh. I had forgotten all about this gibbet. Had a thought of the horror entered my head--that head which had been too full of the fumes of rum punch to yield space for any but the cheeriest, airiest imaginations--I should have given these sand hills the widest berth which the main road provided. I was no coward; but, Lord! to witness such a sight by a stroke of lightning! I say it was as unexpected a thing to my mood, at that moment of its revelation by lightning, as though not a word had been said about it at my uncle’s, and as though I had entered the sand hills absolutely ignorant that a man hung in chains on a gibbet, within shy of a stone from the water. This ignorance it was that dyed the memorable rencounter to a complexion of darkest horror to every faculty that I could collect. While I paused, breathing very short, hearing no sound but the thunder and the pitting of the rain on the sand, and the whisper of the surf along the beach, a vivid stroke of lightning flashed up the gibbet; there was an explosion aloft; rain fell with a sudden fury, and the hail so drummed upon my hat that I lost the noise of the surf in the sound. A number of flashes followed in quick succession, and by the dazzle I beheld the gibbet and its ghastly burden as clearly as though the sun was in the sky. The figure hung in chains; the bight of the chain passed under the fork betwixt the thighs, and a link on either hand led through an iron collar, which clasped the neck of the body, the head lolling over and looking sideways down, and the two ends of the chain met in a ring, held by a hook, secured by a nut on top of the timber projection. But what was that at the foot of the gibbet? I believed, at first, that it was a strengthening piece, a big block or pile of wood designed to join and secure the bare, black, horrible post from which the beam pointed like some frightful spirit finger, seaward, as though death’s skeleton arm held up a dead man to the storm.