“We should freeze! Let us trust to the horses’ instincts to go on and save us!” answered the others, and they continued to crawl along, the old doctor sinking again into his abstraction of grief, with his white beard sunk on his breast. Colder and more piercing grew the wind, till the cold seemed to strike to the marrow of every one’s bones, and their thick clothing did not seem to keep out the chill any more than coverings of paper. Too late they repented that they had ventured out in the teeth of the storm, not dreaming it would increase to such unusual violence for the season of the year. They were just wondering over their whereabouts, and how far they could be from the inn, when the noisy tumult of a river rushing over its rocky bed came to their ears from the base of the mountain, as they wound around its summit. “Hark! do you hear the river? We are at that dangerous turn in the road, going around the cliffs. God help us if we should go over here! We would be dashed to pieces on the rocks, or go into the water!” cried one of the drivers, and the other one, just ahead, shouted back encouragingly: “Do you hear the river plunging through the narrows, going to the falls? Well, it is only half a mile from here to the inn! We shall soon be safe!” Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when terrible sounds came back to them from ahead, where the grim, black hearse was dragging through the snow with two stalwart men on the box, leaving the reins loose on the horses’ backs that the faithful animals might better pick their way in the darkness. The bewildered beasts had lost their footing and plunged headlong over the cliffs with their human freight of dead and living passengers! The loud screams of the two men, the agonized snorting of the horses, the grating noise of the overturned hearse as it crashed on its side and hurtled over the rocky road down the hill to the precipice overhanging the river, were sounds of horror to ring in one’s ears till death. “The hearse has gone over into the river! God help the men!” groaned the men in the wagons. And in the first one the men had as much as they could do to hold back a half-crazed old man, wild with grief, from springing out into the night, and following his dead son down to the depths where the swollen river thundered far below. They held him down by main force, their hearts as heavy as lead and their lips dumb with horror, until after what seemed interminable lengths of time their horses guided them safely to the mountain inn. The people that came out to meet them were not astonished at the terrible story they told. They rather wondered that any had escaped destruction on such a night. “They went into the river, and are dead before now, but to-morrow we will organize a searching party,” they said, as they warmed and fed the survivors of the strange funeral train.