And yet Nelly had not spoken one word about the prophecy when he had talked with her a few hours before!
This circumstance caused Wesley no little surprise. He asked himself if Polwhele's girl was the only sensible person in the neighbourhood. While the other people were overwhelmed at the prospect of a catastrophe on Monday, she had gone to visit her young ladies and brought back with her a pair of young doves.
He began to feel that he had never given the girl credit for some of those qualities which she possessed--qualities which certainly are not shared by the majority of womankind.
Her father told him before he had reached the village something of the marvels which had come under his notice only two nights before. But he tried to make it plain that he did not attach any great importance to them: he did not regard them as portents, however other people might be disposed to do so. The old fisherman was shrewd enough to guess that Mr. Wesley's sympathies were not with Pritchard. Still he could not deny that what he had seen and heard surpassed all his experience of the Channel, although he allowed that he had heard of the like from the lips of mariners who had voyaged far and wide, and had probably been disbelieved in both hemispheres, by the best judges of what was credible. He had heard, for instance, of parallels where through long sultry nights the ocean had seemed one mass of flame. But he himself was no deep-sea sailor.
“A sea of flame is common enough in some quarters,” said Wesley. “I myself have seen the Atlantic palpitating like a furnace, and our ship dashed flakes of fire from the waters that were cloven by her cut-water. But the sounds which you say you heard--think you not that they came from a distant thunderstorm?”
“Likely enough, sir, likely enough,” replied the man after a pause; but he spoke in a way that assured Mr. Wesley that he knew very well that the sounds had not come from a thunderstorm, however distant. He had had plenty of experience of thunderstorms, near at hand as well as far off.
“Or Admiral Hawke's ships--might not some of the Admiral's fleet have come within a mile or two of the coast and discharged their carronades?” Wesley suggested.