"Once more I brought my spy-glass to bear on the place where he had been, and was almost on the point of calling out to warn him off the edge of the cliff, forgetting the distance I was away. Napoleon had stepped, with one foot before him, on the very brink, his two hands hanging loose by his side, with the glass in one of them, till the shadow of his small black cocked hat covered the hollows of his eyes, and he stood, as it were, looking down past the face of the precipice. What he thought of, no mortal tongue can say, whether he was master at the time over a wilder battle than any he'd ever fought--but just then, what was the surprise it gave me to see the head of a man, with a red tasselled cap on it, raised through amongst the ivy from below, while he seemed to have his feet on the cracks and juts of the rock, hoisting himself by one hand round the tangled roots, till no doubt he must have looked right aloft into the French Emperor's face; and perhaps he whispered something--though, for my part, it was all dumb show to me, where I knelt peering into the glass. I saw even _him_ start at the suddenness of the thing--he raised his head upright, still glancing down over the front of the crag, with the spread hand lifted, and the side of his face half-turned toward the party within earshot behind, where the Governor and the rest apparently kept together out of respect, no doubt watching both Napoleon's back and the ship of war far beyond. The keen sunlight on the spot brought out every motion of the two in front--the _one_ so full in my view, that I could mark his look settle again on the other below, his firm lips parting and his hand out before him, like a man seeing a spirit he knew; while a bunch of leaves on the end of a wand came stealing up from the stranger's post to Napoleon's very fingers.