It is, indeed, a difficult thing to describe the peculiar state of his feelings as he struggled onwards, sometimes blown back to a stand-still, and again driven forward by the gloomy and capricious tyranny of the blast, as if he were its mere plaything.
In spite, however, of the conflict of the external elements as they careered over the country around him, he could not shake from his imagination the impression left there by the groan which he had heard at the Grey Stone.

A supernatural terror, therefore, was upon him, and he felt as if he were in the presence of an accompanying spirit--of a spirit that seemed anxious to disclose the fact that murder would not rest; and so strongly did this impression gain upon him, that in the fitful howling of the storm, and in its wild wailing and dying sobs among the trees and hedges, as he went along, he thought he could distinguish sounds that belonged not to this life.

Still he proceeded, his terrors thus translating, as it were, the noisy conflict of the elements into the voices of the dead, or thanking Heaven that the strong winds brought him to a calmer sense of his position, by the necessity that they imposed of preserving himself against their violence.

In this anomalous state he advanced, until he came to a grove of old beeches that grew at the foot of one of the hill-ranges we have described, and here the noises he heard were not calculated to diminish his terrors.

As the huge trees were tossed and swung about in the gloomy moonlight, his ears were assailed by a variety of wild sounds which had never reached them before.