I'd be nearer heaven then, here on earth, than I fear sometimes I ever shall be, even after I'm dead and gone." "Well, she's a good girl, mazed or not; but look at her now! What's she after ?" The girl had raised her head, and was pointing, with one arm stretched stiffly out toward the sea.
Old Willis went down to her, and touched her gently on the shoulder.
"Come home, my maid, then, you'll take cold, indeed;" but she did not move or lower her arm.
The old man, accustomed to her fits of fixed melancholy, looked down under her bonnet, to see whether she was "past," as he called it.

By the moonlight he could see her great eyes steady and wide open.

She motioned him away, half impatiently, and then sprang to her feet with a scream.
"A man! A man! Save him!" As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of the point in a broad sheet of foam.
And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure.

He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the edge of the rock.
"Save him!" shrieked she again, as twenty men rushed forward--and stopped short.

The man was fully thirty yards from them: but close to him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, cutting the point across.