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She twisted her hair into a loose knot, and cowered over the hearth, where she kindled some pieces of lightwood, and then sat huddled before it, watching the murky roll of its flames, till the maid came back with the tray.

Slowly the night waned, and the shrill tones of reveille told that another day had risen before the murky sky brightened.

It crawled out of the ground, shook its bones in order to throw off the earth that stuck to them, making a dry, rattling noise with them, and raising up its skull, looked with its cold, blue eyes at the murky, cloud-covered sky. “I hope you are well!” said the devil. “How can I be?” curtly answered the author. He spoke in a strange, low voice, as if two bones were grating against each other.

The sun grows chill, coppery and rayless, and soon a fog, creeping along the river, silently encloses each particle of smoke within a watery shroud, and a mantle of murky gloom invests the city. What was it that wrought this sudden change in the mind of Job Hesketh? The story is soon told.

Towards eight bells in the middle watch, I was standing on a gun well forward on the starboard side, listening to the groaning of the main tack, as the swelling sail, the foot of which stretched transversely right athwart the ship's deck in a black arch, struggled to tear it up, like some dark impalpable spirit of the air striving to burst the chains that held him, and escape high up into the murky clouds, or a giant labouring to uproot an oak, and wondering in my innocence how hempen cord could brook such strain when just as the long waited for strokes of the bell sounded gladly in mine ear, and the shrill clear note of the whistle of the boatswain's mate had been followed by his gruff voice, grumbling hoarsely through the gale, "Larboard watch, ahoy!"

At length, after a terrific blast, which made the whole castle shake, the hall was completely lit up by the murky glare of the full moon, and V exclaimed, "Awful weather!" The Freiherr, quite absorbed in the consideration of the wealth which had fallen to him, replied indifferently, as he turned over a page of the receipt-book with a satisfied smile, "It is indeed; very stormy!"

He could not say, "Mara, I have done wrong," though he every day meant to do it, and sometimes sat an hour in her presence, feeling murky and stony, as if possessed by a dumb spirit; then he would get up and fling stormily out of the house. Poor Mara wondered if he really would go without one kind word.

Before my arrival in Bangkok it had been his not uncommon practice to send for a missionary at midnight, have him beguiled or abducted from his bed, and conveyed by boat to the palace, some miles up the river, to inquire if it would not be more elegant to write murky instead of obscure, or gloomily dark rather than not clearly apparent.

Any other candidate against him, he himself buoyed up with his own old glorious faith, his Princess, dazzling meteor illuminating the murky streets dear God! what would not have been the joy of battle during the past week, what would not have been the intense thrill, the living of a thousand lives in these few hours of suspense now so dull with dreariness and pain!

The mighty waves that broke against the rocks, the vivid lightning bursting through the castles of murky clouds, the majestic and incessant rolling of the thunder, formed one of those enchanting spectacles to which they had been from infancy accustomed.