red on. Saul
sat on the front ledge of the cart to balance it the better. The coffin,
wedged in with the potash barrel, lay pretty still as long as they kept
on the soft soil of the forest, but when, about one o'clock, the team
emerged upon a corduroy road, made of logs lying side by side across the
path, the jolting often jerked the barrel out of place, and then Saul
would go to the back of the cart and jerk it and the coffin into
position again.

The forest was behind them now. This log road was constructed across a
large tract which sometime since had been cleared by a forest fire, but
was now covered again by thick brush standing eight or ten feet high.
One could see little on either side the road except the brown and grey
twigs of the saplings that grew by the million, packed close together.
The way had been cut among them, yet they were forcing their sharp
shoots up again between the seams of the corduroy, and where, here and
there, a log had rotted they came up thickly. The ground was low, and
would have been wet about the bushes had it not been frozen. Above, the
sky was white. Saul could see nothing but his straight road before and
behind, the impenetrable thicket and the white sky. It was a lonely
thing thus to journey.

While he had been under the forest, with an occasional squirrel or
chipmunk to arrest his gaze, and with all things as familiar to sight as
the environments of the house in which he was accustomed to live, Saul
had felt the vigour of the morning, and eaten his cold fat bacon,
sitting on the cart, without discontent. But now it was
afternoon--which, we all know, brings a somewhat more depressing
air--and the budless thickets stood so close, so still, Saul became
conscious that his load was a corpse. He had hoped, in a dull way, to
fall in with a companion on this made road; the chances were against it,
and the chances prevailed. Saul ate more bread and bacon. He had to walk
now, and often to give the cart a push, so that the way was laborious;
but, curiously enough, it was not the labour he objected to, but the
sound of his own voice. All the way the silent thicket was listening to
his "Gee-e, gee; haw then";--"yo-hoi-eest"; yet, as he and his oxen
progressed further into the quiet afternoon, he gradually grew more and
more timid at the shouts he must raise. It seemed to him that the dead
man was listening, or that unknown shapes or essences might be disturbed
by his voice and rush out from t