 There is a dimness over your figures!  You  sit quivering indistinctly with each motion of the blaze,  which eddies about you like a flood, so that you all have  the look of visions, or people that dwell only in the fire  light, and will vanish from existence, as completely as  your own shadows, when the flame shall sink among  the embers.  Hark!  let me listen for the swell of the  surf; it should be audible a mile inland, on a night like  this.  Yes; there I catch the sound, but only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach; though, by the almanac, it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows must now be dashing within thirty yards of our door.  Ah! the old man's ears are failing him; and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind; else you would not all be so shadowy, in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.