"Stop them, I say!" he roared in a voice of thunder. The sexton, pulling the ropes in the middle of the church, paid no attention.
Exasperated beyond endurance, the clergyman hurled the prayer book at the sexton's head, and felled him! Still the bells went on of their own accord.
"Stop! sto-o-o-o-p! I say," he yelled fiercely, and, hitting the pulpit with his fist, he split it from top to bottom.
Minnie cried "Shame!" at this, and from that moment the bells ceased.
Whether it was that the fog-bells ceased at that time, or that Minnie's voice charmed Ruby's thoughts away, we cannot tell, but certain it is that the severely tried youth became entirely oblivious of everything. The marriage-party vanished with the bells; Minnie, alas! faded away also; finally, the roar of the sea round the Bell Rock, the rock itself, its lighthouse and its inmates, and all connected with it, faded from the sleeper's mind, and
"like the baseless fabric of a vision, Left not a wrack behind."
CHAPTER XXXIII
CONCLUSION
Facts are facts; there is no denying that. They cannot be controverted; nothing can overturn them, or modify them, or set them aside. There they stand in naked simplicity: mildly contemptuous alike of sophists and theorists.
Immortal facts! Bacon founded on you; Newton found you out; Dugald Stewart and all his fraternity reasoned on you, and followed in your wake. What would this world be without facts? Rest assured, reader, that those who ignore facts and prefer fancies are fools. We say it respectfully. We have no intention of being personal, whoever you may be.