We were going at a good speed, and had ridden, as I judged, about three miles, when there came a great flash of lightning--not like any flash I had ever seen before. It was neither the reflection of lightning below the horizon, nor the sudden zigzagged blade, the very idea of force without weight; it was the burst of a ball-headed torrent of fire from a dark cloud, like water sudden from a mountain's heart, which went rushing down a rugged channel, as if the cloud were indeed a mountain, and the fire one of its cataracts. Its endurance was momentary, but its moments might have been counted, for it lasted appreciably longer than an ordinary flash, revealing to my eyes what remains on my mind clear as the picture of some neighbouring tree on the skin of one slain by lightning. The torrent tumbled down the cloud and vanished, but left with me the vision of a man, plainly my uncle, a few hundred yards from me, on a gigantic gray horse, which reared high with fright. But for its size I could have testified before a magistrate, that I had not only seen that horse in the stable as my pony was being saddled, but had stroked and kissed him on the nose. I conceived at once that his apparent size was an illusion caused by the suddenness and keenness of the light, and that my uncle had come home before I had well reached the moor, and had ridden out after me. With a wild cry of delight, I turned at once to leave the road and join him. But the thunder that moment burst with a terrific bellow, and swallowed my cry. The same instant, however, came through it from the other side the voice of my uncle only a few yards away. “Stay, little one,” he shouted; “stay where you are. I will be with you in a moment.” I obeyed, as ever and always without a thought I obeyed the slightest word of my uncle: Zoe and I stood as if never yet parted from chaos and the dark, for Zoe too loved his voice. The wind rose suddenly from a lull to a great roar, emptying a huge cloudful of rain upon us, so that I heard no sound of my uncle's approach; but presently out of the dark an arm was around me, and my head was lying on my uncle's bosom. Then the dark and the rain seemed the natural elements for love and confidence. “But, uncle,” I murmured, full of wonder which had had no time to take shape, “how is it?” He answered in a whisper that seemed to dread the ear of the wind, lest it should hear him-- “You saw, did you?” “I saw you upon Death away there in the middle of the lightning. I was going to you. I don't know what to think.” My uncle and I often called the horse by his English name. “Neither do I,” he returned, with a strange half voice, as if he were choking. “It must have been--I don't know what. There is a deep bog away just there. It must be a lake by now!” “Yes, uncle; I might have remembered! But how was I to think of that when I saw you there--on dear old Death too! He's the last of horses to get into a bog: he knows his own weight too well!”