nerves tremble with the same terror that besets him who looks downward
from the verge of a lofty precipice. It is wholly grim and stern; no
touch of beauty relieves the austere majesty of that presence. At the
foot of Cape Eternity the water is of unknown depth, and it spreads, a
black expanse, in the rounding hollow of shores of unimaginable wildness
and desolation, and issues again in its river's course around the base
of Cape Trinity. This is yet loftier than the sister cliff, but it
slopes gently backward from the stream, and from foot to crest it is
heavily clothed with a forest of pines. The woods that hitherto have
shagged the hills with a stunted and meagre growth, showing long
stretches scarred by fire, now assume a stately size, and assemble
themselves compactly upon the side of the mountain, setting their
serried stems one rank above another, till the summit is crowned with
the mass of their dark green plumes, dense and soft and beautiful; so
that the spirit perturbed by the spectacle of the other cliff is calmed
and assuaged by the serene grandeur of this.

There have been, to be sure, some human agencies at work even under the
shadow of Cape Eternity to restore the spirit to self-possession, and
perhaps none turns from it wholly dismayed. Kitty, at any rate, took
heart from some works of art which the cliff wall displayed near the
water's edge. One of these was a lively fresco portrait of
Lieutenant-General Sherman, with the insignia of his rank, and the other
was an even more striking effigy of General O'Neil, of the Armies of the
Irish Republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed in a bold
conceit of his presence there as conqueror of Canada in the year 1875.
Mr. Arbuton was inclined to resent these intrusions upon the sublimity
of nature, and he could not conceive, without disadvantage to them, how
Miss Ellison and the colonel should accept them so cheerfully as part of
the pleasure of the whole. As he listened blankly to their exchange of