of that hideous mask of death which the gazer sees glooming behind it,--this is perhaps the hardest thing of all to see and not go mad. None of these conditions may have been quite fulfilled in the glance cast backward by Horace Townsend at that moment; but let us see how far the situation varied from the most terrible of requirements. Going over that back-bone in the morning, the lawyer, who chanced to be for the moment alone, had swung himself from his horse, leaving the animal standing in the trough, peered through the bushes to the right, down into Oakes' Gulf, and walked to the edge of the broad stone that formed the projection over the Gulf of Mexico. He had found that stone smooth and rounded, a little slippery from the almost perpetual rains and mists beating upon it, not more than eight to ten feet wide from the path to the verge, and with a perceptible slope downwards in the latter direction. He had thought, then, that it needed a clear head and a sure foot (both of which he possessed) to stand in that position or even to tread the stone at any distance from the path. And so thinking, he had swung himself back into the saddle and ridden on,--the incident, then, not worth relating--now, a thing of the most fearful consequence. For as he glanced back, at that sudden cry, he saw Clara Vanderlyn sitting her horse on the very top of that smooth plateau of stone overlooking the two thousand feet of the Gulf of Mexico, at what could not have been more than four or five feet from the awful verge, and certainly on the downward slope of what was an insecure footing even for the plastic foot of man--much more for the clumsy iron-shod hoof!