ness.
Great trees reared their majestic heads to mingle their foliage and shut
out the light; every creeping, flying, walking creature seemed awed into
a vague murmuring that was deeper than silence. The Grove of Mysteries
was a semicircular space of cool, mossy sward, bowered in great trees
and tangled vine screens; its background was the bare rock of the
cliffside itself--actually, though unknown to the rabble, the outer
rocky wall of the great chamber--and against this stood the altar.

The old woman had made use of her skinny limbs to good effect, impelled
by a fear that had become terror. The altar was resplendent in silk and
velvet, fashioned for an altar very different from this; but in place of
the vessels usually associated with so sacred a piece of furniture, the
Altar of the Grove was embellished with a mosaic of skulls and bones
surrounding a complete skeleton which held its head in one grisly hand.

In the hollow eye-sockets glowed a weird fire that darted forth at
irregular intervals like glances of demoniacal hate; at the altar foot a
great censer erupted a dense cloud of pungent smoke that rendered the
altar and those about it still more vague and ghostly. And the glade was
full of cowering, slavering blacks and half-breeds, whose superstitious
terrors reached high tide with each succeeding swirl of smoke or
outflash of eye-socket fires.

Dolores went directly to the old woman, who stood in cringing
subservience with a plain white garment in her hands. This she placed on
the girl's shoulders, fastening it at the bosom with a small skull of
jade stone whose grinning teeth were pearls, and whose eye-sockets were
empty with an awful blackness. The gold circlet was discarded, and in
its place Dolores placed on her head a turban formed from a stuffed
coiled snake, whose neck and head darted hither and thither on cunning
springs with her every motion and gesture.

To this awesome place came the herd that Milo drove before him; and not
a man among the hardened crew was hardy enough to carry his bravado into
the Grove. Blacks and whites alike, no matter what their inmost thoughts
might be, yielded to the spell of the place the moment their feet trod
the sward and the congregation settled into the places allotted to them.

Dolores glided out in front of the altar, and eyes glittered, dusky
throats went constricted and dry with terror when she stirred up the
brazier and was hidden for a moment in the rising vo