of the
smoking loungers on the stoop, to whom he was as if he had never been
born. But this, from his preoccupied state, did not strike him as
singular. One little voice, a bird's voice, as he drove along through
the pine woods, sang over and over the same tune,--"Dorcas! Dorcas!"

The silence of the road, when all animated Nature slept in the warm noon
of the late autumn day, when even the wheels scarcely sounded on the
dead pine-spears, made this solitary voice, like Swan's newly awakened
memory, all but angelic.

The sadness, which, through all the beauty of a New-England November,
whispers in the fallen leaves, and through the rustle of the firs,
overspread Swan's soul, not yet strengthened as well as freshened by his
native air. He was melancholy and half stunned. He had been frightened,
as he sat in the chair, by the capacity for enjoyment and suffering that
was left in him. And he peered curiously into his own soul, as if the
sensibilities locked up there belonged to somebody else. Impulsively
he turned his horse towards the graveyard,--forgetting that he had all
along intended to go there,--and fastening him at the broken gate, went
on till he reached his mother's grave. Before his departure he had set
up a slate stone to her memory and that of Robert Day, a soldier in the
English army.

"She shall have a marble monument now, poor mother!" thought the son,
picking his way through the long, tangled grass of the dreary place. Not
a tree, not a shrub in sight. Not even the sward kept carefully. The
slate had fallen flat, or, more likely, had been thrown down, and no
hand had cared to raise again a stone to the memory of a despised enemy,
who had never been even seen in Walton.

When Swan tried to move the stone, a thousand ugly things swarmed from
beneath it. He dropped it, shuddering, and passed on. A white marble
tablet of some pretension stood near, and recorded the names of

ZEPHANIAH FOX,

AND

AZUBAH, HIS WIFE.

_They died the, same day and their bones rest
here, till the final resurrection_.

He glanced at the date,--

JUNE 14th, 1805.

And he had never heard of it!--never guessed it! But then, he had not
heard at all from Dorcas. Poor Dorcas! how had she borne this sudden and
terrible bereavement? All that he might have been to her in her sorrow,
for one moment all that he had _not_ been, floated by him. The yellow
melted away that had so long incrusted his soul, and he felt on hi