"Samson," she said, feeling all the influences of Princess Anne again, and forgetting her own misery, "it's Mrs. Dennis's husband come home and shipwrecked."
When Virgie next remembered, she was on a vast hill of sand, near a lighthouse that was built upon it, and flashed its lenses sleepily upon a sullen break of day, the mutual lights showing the tops of trees rising out of the sand, where a forest had been buried alive, like little twigs in amber.
Almost naked with fighting the storm, Samson Hat slept at her side, peaceful as hale age and virtue could enjoy the balm of oblivion in life.
"Happy are the black," thought the sick girl, "that take no thought on things this white blood in me makes so big: on freedom and my father. Father, do love me before I die!"
She knelt on the great sand hillock by Cape Henlopen and prayed till she, too, lost her knowledge of self, and was sleeping again at Samson's side. She dreamed of innumerable angels flying all around her, and yet their voices were so harsh they awoke her at last, and still these seraphs were flying in the day. She saw their wings, and moved the old man at her side to say,
"Samson, why cannot these angels sing?"
The old man looked up and faintly smiled:
"Poor Virgie, dey is wild-fowls, all bewildered by dat storm: geese and swans. Dey can't sing like angels."
"Yes," said the girl; "something sings, I know. What is it?"