He started up, and almost overset the boat.

“Hold on!” cried Foster; “you have her!”

Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth heaved amain, and up came a white swash to the surface of the river.  It was the flow of a woman’s garments.  A little higher, and we saw her dark hair streaming down the current.  Black River of Death, thou hadst yielded up thy victim!  Zenobia was found!

Silas Foster laid hold of the body; Hollingsworth likewise grappled with it; and I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat’s side.  Arriving near the shore, we all three stept into the water, bore her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree.

“Poor child!” said Foster,—­and his dry old heart, I verily believe, vouchsafed a tear, “I’m sorry for her!”

Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame.  For more than twelve long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes.  Of all modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest.  Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility.  She was the marble image of a death-agony.  Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and—­thank God for it!—­in the attitude of prayer.  Ah, that rigidity!  It is impossible to bear the terror of it.  It seemed,—­I must needs impart so much of my own miserable idea,—­it seemed as if her body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave; and that when Zenobia rose at the day of judgment, it would be in just the same attitude as now!

One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear.  She knelt as if in prayer.  With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father, reconciled and penitent.  But her arms!  They were bent before her, as if she struggled against Providence in never-ending hostility.  Her hands!  They were clenched in immitigable defiance.  Away with the hideous thought.  The flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark pool—­when her breath was gone, and her soul at her lips was as long, in its capacity of God’s infinite forgiveness, as the lifetime of the world!

Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.

“You have wounded the poor thing’s breast,” said he to Hollingsworth, “close by her heart, too!”

“Ha!” cried Hollingsworth with a start.

And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!

“See!” said Foster.  “That’s the place where the iron struck her.  It looks cruelly, but she never felt it!”

He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side.  His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as before.  He made another effort, with the same result.