large room; and being herself a lady of a picturesque turn, and loving
the grander melodrama of Nature, bid her maid leave the shutters open,
and watched the splendid effects from her bed, until, the storm being
still distant, she fell asleep.

It was travelling slowly across the lake, and it was the deep-mouthed
clangour of its near approach that startled her, at dead of night, from
her slumber, to witness the same phenomena in the tremendous loudness
and brilliancy of their near approach.

At this magnificent spectacle she was looking with the awful ecstasy of
an observer in whom the sense of danger is subordinated to that of the
sublime, when she saw suddenly at the window a woman, whose long hair
and dress seemed drenched with water. She was gazing in with a look of
terror, and was shaking the sash of the window with vehemence. Having
stood there for a few seconds, and before the lady, who beheld all this
from her bed, could make up her mind what to do, the storm-beaten
figure, wringing her hands, seemed to throw herself backward, and was
gone.

Possessed with the idea that she had seen some poor woman overtaken in
the storm, who, failing to procure admission there, had gone round to
some of the many doors of the mansion, and obtained an entry there, she
again fell asleep.

It was not till the morning, when she went to her window to look out
upon the now tranquil scene, that she discovered what, being a stranger
to the house, she had quite forgotten, that this room was at a great
height--some thirty feet--from the ground.