The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out, had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp, slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea; every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated, with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house, ah-o-oy!" It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house--about two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves, ah-o-oy!" I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not chanced at that moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop, snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and signaled for help to remove it.