“I suppose it’s the strong southerly wind,” said Bart.
“Yes, I dare say.”
“The wind seems to strike us here from a very odd direction. It must come across the Basin of Minas. It’s just as though it came from the east.”
“O, we can’t tell,” said the doctor. “This road winds so that we get it sometimes in our faces, and sometimes in our backs.”
“It must be after nine,” said Bruce.
“Yes,” said the doctor; “and I dare say we’ve passed several houses on the road. The people here are not very liberal in the use of candles. They sit around the kitchen fire till about nine o’clock, and then go to bed. That’s the reason why we have not seen any lights. There must be quite a number of houses along here.”
By this time they had come in front of the house. It stood about a dozen yards from the road. The light proceeded from a small, lower window. The house was only a cottage, and the dim outline of a barn could be seen a little farther on.
“This does not look like Atkins’s,” said the doctor, after he had scanned the cottage and the barn. “Atkins’s is very much larger than this, and is a different looking place altogether. I don’t think we can have passed it. No, it must be farther on. At any rate, we can ask here, and they can tell us exactly how far we have yet to go. I’m sorry it isn’t Atkins’s, though, for I fully expected to be there. Besides, we all want rest.”
The doctor looked once more at the house, and then at the barn. As they stood there, thus looking in silence, there came to their ears a very peculiar sound, which made every one start.
It was a long, rolling sound, made up of the rush of many waters, such as can be heard nowhere else but upon the sea-shore—that peculiar noise of gathering floods, such as is heard when the sea throws forth its waves towards the land, to curl up, foaming, and break upon the strand. Here it arose amid this darkness,—that peculiar, that unmistakable sound,—with its gathering waters, its foam, its roll, and its crash as the uplifted waters broke,—the sound that can be made by the surf, and the surf alone.