I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with regard to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front of the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less, I do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had become acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I am sure, or she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it in her many allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part, had speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with which the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon a number of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in spite of the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting behind the local _esprit de corps_ which hid the real truth from him. Now much was explained--provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually been permitted to discover what had been kept from us--much, that is to say, except the nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I supposed, we should never find out. But there I was mistaken, as events will show. For Destiny, having got her puppets at last into position, was even now gathering the strings into her hands for the final “Dance of Death.” In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with a falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not long in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which followed, notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind came from the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely, cut the cliffs like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook with the roar of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into which its breath was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered like chaff on the uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of agony. God knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the day broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.