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Before the Civil War, the superb battlements and turrets of Martindale Castle looked down on the red brick-built Hall, as it stole out from the green plantations, just as an oak in Martindale Chase would have looked beside one of the stunted and formal young beech-trees with which Bridgenorth had graced his avenue; but after the siege which we have commemorated, the enlarged and augmented Hall was as much predominant in the landscape over the shattered and blackened ruins of the Castle, of which only one wing was left habitable, as the youthful beech, in all its vigour of shoot and bud, would appear to the same aged oak stripped of its boughs, and rifted by lightning, one-half laid in shivers on the ground, and the other remaining a blackened and ungraceful trunk, rent and splintered, and without either life or leaves.

And now the sole object distinctly visible was the figure of a weary sentinel, who stood on the frowning rampart immediately above the rifted wall, and whose drooping figure, propped upon his weapon, was indicated in hard relief against the thin, solitary streak of light still shining in the cold and cloudy wastes of the western sky.

Then the whole building began to change. It slowly blossomed into a huge cloud of pink gas that rifted away, to show people and objects dropping like stones to the ground below. Nema sighed and turned her eyes away. "But it's ridiculous!" Dave protested. "We heard the rip and less than five seconds later, that piece fell.

But I'll ride in nae siccan troop they little ken'd Andrew that asked him. I'll fight when I like mysell, but it sall neither be for the hure o' Babylon, nor any hure in England." Where longs to fall yon rifted spire, As weary of the insulting air, The poet's thoughts, the warrior's fire, The lover's sighs, are sleeping there. Langhorne.

Ten minutes later the driver of the fast Pioneer coach was overtaken and passed by a "man on a Pinto hoss," an event sufficiently notable for remark. At half past two Dick rose in his stirrups with a great shout. Stars were glittering through the rifted clouds, and beyond him, out of the plain, rose two spires, a flagstaff, and a straggling line of black objects.

Beyond this cultured knoll there seemed to be a deep pitch of the land clothed with a hanging wood of heavy timber; and, above this again, the soil surged upward into a huge and round-topped hill, with several golden stubbles, shining out from the frame-work of primeval forest, which, dark with many a mighty pine, covered the mountain to the top, except where at its western edge it showed a huge and rifted precipice of rock.

I saw a face, my God! how dark, how deadly, how terrible it was! I knew that face, and my heart was rifted as if by a thunderbolt. The loud report of a pistol, and a shriek such as never before issued from mortal lips, bursting from mine, were simultaneous sounds. Richard fell back with a deep groan.

That is the sorrow of rifted lives the dark between, on each side the thoughts that yearn. "And and," Jack was stammering on, "I thought, perhaps, Mistress Rebecca 'd be willing to stand by Mizza," nodding to the young squaw, "that is, if you asked Rebecca," pleaded Jack. "We'll see," said I. For the New England conscience was something to reckon with! "How did you come here?" I asked.

So, after another crawl up to the ridge to make certain that no boats were about for he had frequently seen them fishing in the neighbourhood of L'Etat he crept down the flank of his pyramid almost to sea-level to get across to the outer pile. He had to pick his way with caution across a valley of black rocks, rifted and chasmed by the fury of the waves.

The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine-boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above.