The sky had now grown perceptibly darker, though it was still some hours to night; and at the moment when Bell Crawford entered the inner room of the sorceress the gathering thunder-storm burst in fury. The thunder was not as yet peculiarly heavy, and the flashes of lightning had often been surpassed in vividness; but the rain poured down in torrents and the gust of wind, which swept through the streets set windows rattling and doors and shutters banging at a rate which promised work for the carpenters. The two windows of the room looked out upon the street, though through closed blinds; and whether intentionally or inadvertently, the two in waiting drew two chairs to one of the windows, very near together, and sat there, watching the dashing rain and listening to the storm. Had there been any possibility of hearing the words spoken in the adjoining room, that possibility would now have been entirely destroyed by the noise of the storm; and whatever of curiosity either may have felt for the result of Bell's adventure, was rendered inefficient for the time. Meanwhile, something else was working of quite as much consequence. Chances and accidents are very curious things; and those who have no belief in a Supreme Being who brings about great results by apparently insignificant agencies, must have a very difficult time of it, in reconciling the incongruous and the inadequate. Holmes, the merriest and wisest of social philosophers (when he does not run mad on the human-snake theory, as he has done in "Elsie Venner") very prettily illustrates the opposite, as to how the agency which moves the great may also perform the little, in "The force that wheels the planets round delights in spinning tops, And that young earthquake t'other day was great on shaking props;" but the opposite may be illustrated more easily, and is certainly illustrated much oftener. Not only may "A broken girth decide a nation's fate,"