"Good Gord A'mighty, chile, you think Aunt Silly am gwine tote dade body off in the lonesomely night?" asked the old woman, her very teeth chattering with the superstitious fear peculiar to her race. The girl realized the risk of her plan being thwarted, and raising herself to a sitting posture she seized the old woman's hands and fixed her dying eyes full on her face. "Aunt Silly," she gasped, "I am a dying woman; I am very near to God; I have talked with Him, and He has answered me. My will has been crushed in life, I swear it shall not in death. Before twenty-four hours Claire Douglass shall join me in the crystal cavern of Silver Springs. If you do not grant my request every spirit of evil shall surround you. Palsied and blind you shall grow, and deaf--deaf to every sound but the ghosts of the dead, which shall pursue you by day and haunt you by night. Do you swear to obey my dying request, or will you refuse me, and reap the prophecy of a dying woman, which shall rest upon your cowardly head for refusing to obey God's will?" The old woman was shaking like an aspen. Her eyes protruded with fear, and great beads of perspiration rolled down her cheeks. The strength of the dying girl's will had prevailed, and the old woman answered: "I promises, honey; I promises." It was a solemn and awful sight that night, witnessed alone by God and nature; the boat, which drifted down Silver Springs in the moonlight, bearing its two strange occupants--the one weird, bent, grotesque; the other, so silent, so white, so pathetic, in its dead loveliness. Not a leaf was stirring, not a sound heard, but the splash, splash of the old woman's oars, as her boat, with its strange, beautiful burden, drifted over the curious, transparent body of water; drifted until it reached Boiling Springs, then veered about and stood still. Gently and easily, as if it had been a babe, the old woman lifted the little body. Something of her fear had departed in the placid smile of the dead face. Tears rolled down her dusky face as she bent forward in obedience to the girl's curious request. For a moment the body rocked to and fro on the bosom of the water, upon which its happiest moments had been spent. The dead face smiled, and the wealth of hair gleamed in the moonlight like a sheen of gold. Every pebble was visible in the depths below. Suddenly, as if by magic, the body began sinking. The boiling of the spring had ceased, showing a peculiar little fissure in the rock from whence all the strange body of water came. The fissure slowly divided, received the dead body and closed again, shutting every vestige of it from view. "Gord A'mighty, dat chile a angel sho' nuff. She mus' done talked to de Lawd; she knowed how all dat gwine to be," muttered the old woman, as she rowed back to her cabin in the moonlight.