There was one bond of feeling
at least between the old man and his grandchildren, which
connected his age and their youth unnaturally and closely
together. This feeling was reverence for the superstitions which
had been handed down to them by their ancestors from centuries
and centuries back, as far even as the age of the Druids. The
spirit warnings of disaster and death which the old man heard in
the wailing of the wind, in the crashing of the waves, in the
dreary, monotonous rattling of the casement, the young man and
his affianced wife and the little child who cowered by the
fireside heard too. All differences in sex, in temperament, in
years, superstition was strong enough to strike down to its own
dread level, in the fisherman's cottage, on that stormy night.
Besides the benches by the fireside and the bed, the only piece
of furniture in the room was a coarse wooden table, with a loaf
of black bread, a knife, and a pitcher of cider placed on it. Old
nets, coils of rope, tattered sails, hung, about the walls and
over the wooden partition which separated the room into two
compartments. Wisps of straw and ears of barley drooped down
through the rotten rafters and gaping boards that made the floor
of the granary above.
These different objects, and the persons in the cottage, who
composed the only surviving members of the fisherman's family,
were strangely and wildly lit up by the blaze of the fire and by
the still brighter glare of a resin torch stuck into a block of
wood in the chimney-corner.
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