"I would, but my maid there; and I can't get her home; and I can't leave her." And Willis points to the schoolmistress, who sits upon the flat slope of rock, a little apart from the rest, with her face resting on her hands, gazing intently out into the wild waste. "Make her go; it's her duty--we all have our duties. Why does her mother let her out at this time of night? I keep my maids tighter than that, I warrant." And disciplinarian Mr. Brown makes a step towards her. "Ah, Mr. Brown, don't now! She's not one of us. There's no saying what's going on there in her. Maybe she's praying; maybe she sees more than we do, over the sea there." "What do you mean? There's no living body in those breakers, be sure!" "There's more living things about on such a night than have bodies to them, or than any but such as she can see. If any one ever talked with angels, that maid does; and I've heard her, too; I can say I have--certain of it. Those that like may call her an innocent: but I wish I were such an innocent, Mr. Brown. I'd be nearer heaven then, here on earth, than I fear sometimes I ever shall be, even after I'm dead and gone." "Well, she's a good girl, mazed or not; but look at her now! What's she after?" The girl had raised her head, and was pointing, with one arm stretched stiffly out toward the sea. Old Willis went down to her, and touched her gently on the shoulder. "Come home, my maid, then, you'll take cold, indeed;" but she did not move or lower her arm. The old man, accustomed to her fits of fixed melancholy, looked down under her bonnet, to see whether she was "past," as he called it. By the moonlight he could see her great eyes steady and wide open. She motioned him away, half impatiently, and then sprang to her feet with a scream. "A man! A man! Save him!" As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of the point in a broad sheet of foam. And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the edge of the rock. "Save him!" shrieked she again, as twenty men rushed forward--and stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them: but close to him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, cutting the point across. All knew it: its slippery edge, its polished upright sides, the seething cauldrons within it; and knew, too, that the next wave would boil up from it in a hundred jets, and suck in the strongest to his doom, to fall, with brains dashed out, into a chasm from which was no return.