"Sometimes: but they sleep the other side of the Devil's Crag to-night.
Nothing like a change of quarters for longevity--eh?"

"And they easily spare you."

"Yes, if it be only on rare occasions, and on the plea of family
business. Now then, your hand, as before. Jesu! how it rains--lightning
too--I could look with less fear on a naked sword, than those red,
forked, blinding flashes--Hark! thunder."

The night had now, indeed, suddenly changed its aspect; the rain
descended in torrents, even more impetuously than on the former night,
while the thunder burst over their very heads, as they wound upward
through the brake. With every instant, the lightning broke from the riven
chasm of the blackness that seemed suspended as in a solid substance
above, brightened the whole heaven into one livid and terrific flame, and
showed to the two men the faces of each other, rendered deathlike and
ghastly by the glare. Houseman was evidently affected by the fear that
sometimes seizes even the sturdiest criminals, when exposed to those more
fearful phenomena of the Heavens, which seem to humble into nothing the
power and the wrath of man. His teeth chattered, and he muttered broken
words about the peril of wandering near trees when the lightning was of
that forked character, accelerating his pace at every sentence, and
sometimes interrupting himself with an ejaculation, half oath, half
prayer, or a congratulation that the rain at least diminished the danger.
They soon cleared the thicket, and a few minutes brought them once more
to the banks of the stream, and the increased roar of the cataract. No
earthly scene perhaps could surpass the appalling sublimity of that which
they beheld;--every instant the lightning, which became more and more
frequent, converting the black waters into billows of living fire, or