Not until the afternoon had the storm moderated sufficiently to allow of Wesley and his companion returning to Porthawn. For a full hour after the fall of the rocking-stone they remained together in the shelter. They were both overcome by the horror of what they had witnessed. Happily the charred crown of branches which remained on the tree that had been struck down, after the rain had extinguished the blaze, was enough to hide the fallen stone, and that ghastly white thing that lay thrust out from beneath it like a splash of lichen frayed from the crag. But for another hour the tempest continued, only with brief intervals, when a dense and smoky greyness took the place of the blackness. It seemed as if the storm could not escape from the boundary of the natural amphitheatre in the centre of which was the mound which Wesley had used as his pulpit; and to that man whose imagination was never a moment inactive, the whole scene suggested a picture which he had once seen of the struggle of a thousand demons of the Pit, around a sanctified place, for the souls of those who were safe within the enclosure. There were the swirling black clouds every one of which let loose a fiery flying bolt, while the winds yelled horribly as any fiends that might be struggling with obscene tooth and claw, to crush the souls that were within the sacred circle. The picture had, he knew, been an allegory; he wondered if it were not possible that certain scenes in Nature might be equally allegorical. He hoped that he was not offending when he thought of this citadel of his faith--this pulpit from which he had first preached in Cornwall--being assailed by the emissaries of the Arch-enemy, and jet remaining unmoved as a tower built to withstand every assault of the foe. The whole scene assumed in his imagination a series of fierce assaults, in all of which the enemy was worsted and sent flying over the plain; he could hear the shrieks of the disappointed fiends--the long wail of the wounded that followed every impulse; and then, after a brief interval, there came the renewed assault--the circling tumult seeking for a vulnerable point of entrance. But there it stood, that pulpit from whose height he had preached the Gospel to the thousands who had come to hear him, and had gone forth to join the forces that are evermore at conflict with the powers of evil in the world, There stood his pulpit unmoved in the midst of the tumult. He accepted the symbolism, and he was lifted up by the hope that his work sent forth from this place would live untouched by the many conflicts of time.