Fancy can but feebly conceive, and still less can words describe, the feelings with which the lost men must have beheld their bark drifting away over the face of the waters, and found themselves abandoned in the vast solitude of the ocean. Their sensations must have resembled his who wakens in the grave from a death-like trance, to find himself buried alive!
With what agony must they have gazed upon the distant sails, gliding away over the deep, but keeping far aloof from the rock of desolation, and have heard the shrieks which they sent over the flood, in the vain hope of their reaching some distant ship, mocked by the doleful scream of the sea-fowl! How must their horrors have been aggravated by the far-off view of their native hills, lifting their lonely peaks above the wave, and awakening the dreadful consciousness that they were still within the grasp of humanity, yet no arm stretched forth to save them; while the sun was riding high in the heavens, and the sea basking in his beams below, and nature looking with reckless smiles upon their dying agonies!
As soon as the stupor of horror and amazement had subsided, the party placed the dead bodies in their boat, and, crowding all sail, stood for the Orkneys. They landed at night upon the beach, immediately below the house where the wedding guests were assembled; and there, while they were debating in what manner to proceed, were overheard by the insane wanderer, the result of whose visit has already been described.
She had scarcely left the house, when a low sound of voices was heard approaching. An exclamation of joy broke from the bride. She rushed out of the house with outstretched arms to embrace her lover, and the next moment, with a fearful shriek, fell upon his corpse! With that shriek reason and memory passed away for ever. She was carried to bed delirious, and died towards morning. The bridal was changed into a burial, and Helen Waters and her lover slept in the same grave!
LEGEND OF THE LARGE MOUTH.
By Robert Chambers, LL.D.
“Here’s a large mouth indeed!”
Shakspeare—King John.
Arriving one evening at an inn in Glasgow, I was shown into a room which already contained a promiscuous assemblage of travellers. Amongst these gentlemen—commercial gentlemen chiefly—there was one whose features struck me as being the most ill-favoured I had ever beheld. He was a large, pursy old man, with a forehead “villanous low,” hair like bell-ropes, eyes the smallest and most porkish of all possible eyes, and a nose which showed no more prominence in a side-view than that of the moon, as exhibited in her first quarter upon a freemason’s apron. All these monstrosities were, however, as beauties, as absolute perfections, compared with the mouth—the enormous mouth, which, grinning beneath, formed a sort of rustic basement to the whole superstructure of his facial horrors. This mouth—if mouth it could be called, which bore so little resemblance to the mouths of mankind in general—turned full upon me as I entered, and happening at the moment to be employed in a yawn, actually seemed as if it would have willingly received me into its prodigious crater, and consigned me to the fate of Empedocles, without so much as a shoe being left to tell the tale.
The company of a traveller’s room is generally very stiff, every man sitting by his own table in his own corner, with his back turned upon the rest. It was not so, however, on the present occasion. The most of the present company seemed to have been so long together in the hotel as to have become very gracious with each other; while any recent comers, finding themselves plumped into a society already thawed and commingled, had naturally entered into the spirit of the rest. Soon discovering how matters stood, I joined in the conversation, and speedily found that the man with the large mouth was one of the most polite and agreeable of mankind. He was one of those old, experienced gentlemen of the road, who know everything that is necessary to be known, and are never at a loss about anything. His jokes, his anecdotes, his remarks, were all excellent, and kept the rest bound, as it were, in a chain. The best of him was, that he seemed quite at ease on the subject of his mouth.