gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.

This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant
roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silence
that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a manner
quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own way
then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the wind
noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising,
falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas the
river's song lay between three notes at most--dull pedal notes, that held a
lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my
then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.

It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight
took everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and since
this particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion of
something sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome and
noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly more
alarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon after
sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gathering
clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.

With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in occasional
brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand
more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent
movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and
shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be
come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination
far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding
huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of