shutters, draw the curtains and leave the room, that I may sleep while you take some relaxation and refreshment.” CHAPTER XVII. THE STORM. “The storm comes in fury! loud roars the wild blast— Like a quivering reed, shakes the towering mast, But on the bark dashes, proud, dauntless, and free, She rides like a gull on the crest of the sea.” CHARLES H. BRAINARD. Hagar had gone to her chamber to write a letter. Hagar’s room was on the third floor front, at the angle of the old hall. Its front and east windows overlooked the bay for many miles up and down. Its north windows, the bay, the moor, and forest. It was like the wild girl to choose this eyrie! She selected it because its lofty height commanded the bay,—because it was far above the inhabited parts of the house, no soul, except herself, occupying or ever coming near that floor, or even the one beneath it. Then it was very large and airy, and furnished or _un_furnished, to suit the singular girl’s fancy. The walls were papered with a German landscape paper, representing parts of the Black Forest, and the exploits of the Wild Huntsman. The floor was painted dark green, and the paint had been worn off here and there in patches; so that in the dusky light the room looked not unlike a wild and darksome forest glade, the scene of some weird revel, shown in silent pantomime. A tent bedstead, with hangings of faded green damask, stood at the furthest extremity of the room; the windows were also curtained with the same material. Between the front windows stood an old-fashioned escritoire, full of innumerable drawers, closets, and pigeon-holes, which, with one or two heavy old chairs, completed the original furniture of the room. With Hagar’s varying mood, her dark and dreamy, or her free, wild mood, the singular girl would close all the shutters, and draw all the curtains, converting the room into a shadowy scene of woodland romance, from which the demon figure of the Wild Huntsman would glimmer out in the gleam of some stray ray of sunlight flickering through a crevice in the closed shutters; or, throwing open the four windows to the day, she would let in a flood of light and air, and the prospect of half a hemisphere of blue sky and salt water. Her room now, as she sought it, was light, free, and exposed as the highest peak of the promontory; and the rising wind rushed through it in a strong, fresh current, swelling and flapping the heavy curtains like the heavy sails of a ship. She entered her room, and before sitting down to write, laid off and put away her riding habit in one of the dark closets, and went to the windows and drew aside, looped up and confined the curtains, to keep them from flapping in the wind; _reefed_ them, as a sailor would say. Then she gazed anxiously out upon the boundless bay, where the