had done to a thousand tempests, found that outcry go for nothing, and with it went themselves. Seven hundred towers of Natureʼs building showed their roots to the morning. The old moon expired at O·32; and many a gap the new moon found, where its mother threw playful shadows. The sons of Ytene are not swift–witted, nor deeply read in the calendar; yet they are apt to mark and heed the great convulsions of nature. The old men used to date their weddings from the terrible winter of 1787; the landmark of the young menʼs annals is the storm of 1859.
All that night, young Robert Garnet was strung by some strange tension. Of course he could not sleep, amid that fearful uproar, although he was plunged and lost from sight in Octavius Pellʼs great chair. The only luxury Pell possessed – and that somehow by accident – was a deep, and soft, and mighty chair, big enough for three people. After one of the windows came in, which it did, with a crash, about ten oʼclock, scattering Pellʼs tobacco–jars, and after they had made it good with books and boxes and a rug, so that the wind was filtered through it, John Rosedew and his curate sat on a couple of hard old Windsors, watching the castle of Hurst. Thence would come the signal flash, if any hapless bark should be seen driving over the waters. There they sat, John Rosedew talking, as he could talk to a younger man, when his great heart was moved to its depth, and the multitude of his mind in march, and his soul anticipating it: talking so that Octave Pell, following his silver tones, even through that turmoil, utterly forgot the tempest, and the lapse of hours, and let fall on his lap the pipe, which John had made him smoke.
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