melons on the ground in front of him. The crickets were having a high
time in the stubble around, and the night air drew sweet autumnal
exhalations from the ground; for autumn begins by night a long time
before it does by day. The night wind rustled in the corn with a crisp
articulateness he had never noticed in daytime, and he felt like
an eavesdropper. Then for a while he heard the music of some roving
serenaders, down in the village, and grew pensive with the vague
reminiscences of golden youth, romance, and the sweet past that nightly
music suggests,--vague because apparently they are not reminiscences
of the individual but of the race, a part of the consciousness and ideal
of humanity. At last the music was succeeded by the baying of a dog in
some distant farmyard, and then, ere the ocean of silence had fairly
smoothed its surface over that, a horse began to kick violently in a
neighboring barn. Some time after, a man chopped some kindlings in a
shed a couple of lots off. Gradually, however, the noises ceased like
the oft-returning yet steadily falling ebb of the tide, and Arthur
experienced how many degrees there are of silence, each more utter than
the last, so that the final and absolute degree must be something to
which the utmost quiet obtainable on earth is uproar. One by one the
lights went out in the houses, till the only ones left were in the
windows of the Seminary, visible over the tree-tops a quarter of a mile
away.

"The girls keep late hours," thought Arthur. And from that he fell to
thinking of Lina Maynard and the careless, almost insolent, grace of her
manner, and that indifferent yet penetrating glance of hers. Where did
she come from? Probably from California, or the far West; he had heard
that the girls out there were of a bolder, more unconventional type than
at the East. What a pity she did not fancy Amy!

What was that moving across the melon-patch? He reached for his gun. It
was only a cat, though, after all. The slight noise in the corn-patch
attracted the animal's attention, and it came across and poked its head
into the opening where Arthur sat. As the creature saw him, its start of
surprise would have shattered the nervous system of anything but a cat.
It stood half thrown back on its haunches, its ears flattened, its eyes
glaring in a petrifaction of amazement. Arthur sat motionless as marble,
laughing inwardly. For full two minutes the two stared at each other
without moving a muscle,