Birds awakened from their sleep flew about, huge bats and owls moved from branch to branch with strident cries and gazed at him with their round eyes, but Elias neither heard nor heeded them.

In his fancy he was followed by the offended shades of his family, he saw on every branch the gruesome basket containing Balat's gory head, as his father had described it to him; at every tree he seemed to stumble over the corpse of his grandmother; he imagined that he saw the rotting skeleton of his dishonored grandfather swinging among the shadows--and the skeleton and the corpse and the gory head cried after him, "Coward! Coward!" Leaving the hill, Elias descended to the lake and ran along the shore excitedly.

There at a distance in the midst of the waters, where the moonlight seemed to form a cloud, he thought he could see a specter rise and soar the shade of his sister with her breast bloody and her loose hair streaming about.

He fell to his knees on the sand and extending his arms cried out, "You, too!" Then with his gaze fixed on the cloud he arose slowly and went forward into the water as if he were following some one.

He passed over the gentle slope that forms the bar and was soon far from the shore.