Strange articulations seem to float on the air from that point, the gateway, where the animation in past times must frequently have concentrated itself at hours of coming and going, and general excitement.

There arises an ineradicable fancy that they are human voices; if so, they must be the lingering air-borne vibrations of conversations uttered at least fifteen hundred years ago.

The attention is attracted from mere nebulous imaginings about yonder spot by a real moving of something close at hand.
I recognize by the now moderate flashes of lightning, which are sheet- like and nearly continuous, that it is the gradual elevation of a small mound of earth.

At first no larger than a man's fist it reaches the dimensions of a hat, then sinks a little and is still.

It is but the heaving of a mole who chooses such weather as this to work in from some instinct that there will be nobody abroad to molest him.