And
then at last he heard Father Orin's voice:--
"Hold fast, my boy. Hold fast just a moment longer. We are coming, Toby
and I. Try to hold on. We are almost there."
They reached him as his hand let go and his head sunk, and they bore him
to the shore and laid him down at Ruth's feet, unconscious, but alive.
* * * * *
When Nature has thus rent the trembling earth and thus smitten appalled
humanity by some stupendous convulsion, the outburst of passion nearly
always passes quickly, and she hastens to console by concealing its
traces. These fatal throes were hardly over before she was quelling the
frenzied river by her sudden coldness, and only a few days had passed
before she was covering its subdued waters with a heavy white sheet of
glittering ice. And then, as if to make the torn land lovely again at
once, she wrapped it in a dazzling robe of spotless snow. Above this she
hurriedly hung the broken boughs of the wrecked cottonwoods with
countless flashing prisms, encrusting the smallest twigs to the very top
in sparkling crystal; and coming down she stilled the murmur of the
reeds under icy helmets--binding all together with crystalline cables of
frost.
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