Several hours had passed before he opened his eyes again. He was conscious that a great change of some sort, that he could not at once define, had taken place. The room was in shadow where before it had been lighted by flecks of sunshine, but this was not the change which appealed to him with striking force; nor was it the sense of being refreshed, of which he was now aware. There was a curious silence in the world--the change had something to do with the silence. He felt as he had done in the parlour of Ruthallion Mill when he had been talking to the miller and the machinery had suddenly stopped for the breakfast hour. That was his half-awakened thought. The next moment he was fully awake, and he knew what had happened: when he had fallen asleep the sound of the waves had been in his ears without cessation, and now the sea was silent. He thought that he had never before been in such a silence. It seemed strange, mysterious, full of awful suggestions. It seemed to his vivid imagination that the world, which a short time before had been full of life, had suddenly swooned away. The hush was the hush of death. The silence was the silence of the tomb. “'Tis thus,” he thought, “that a man awakens after death--in a place of awful silences.” And then he felt as if all the men in the world had been cut off in a moment, leaving him the only man alive. It continued unbroken while he lay there. It became a nightmare silence--an awful palpable thing like a Sphinx--a blank dumbness--a benumbing of all Nature--a sealing up of all the world as in the hard bondage of an everlasting Winter. He sprang from his couch unable to endure the silence any longer. He went to the window and looked out, expecting to see the flat unruffled surface of the channel, where the numberless waves had lately been, sparkling with intolerable, brilliance, and every wave sending its voice into the air to join the myriad-voiced chorus that the sea made. He looked out and started back; then he drew up the blind and stared out in amazement, for where the sea had been there was now no sea. He threw open the window and looked out. Far away in the utter distance he saw what seemed like a band of glittering crimson on the horizon. Looking further round and to the west he saw that the sun was more than halfway down the slope of the heavens in that quarter and it was of the darkest crimson in colour--large, but no longer fiery. Then there came a murmur to his ears--the murmur of a multitude of people; and above this sound came a hoarse, monotonous voice, crying: “I heard one say to me: 'There shall be no sea--there shall be no more sea'; and the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible Day of the Lord. Repent--repent--repent!”