nison stored up fer winter. But this air
yer home,"--he pointed upward at a little clearing beginning, as they
approached, to be visible amidst the forest,--"an' ef ye air satisfied
with sech ez it be, that comes from laziness stiddier a contented
sperit."

With this caustic saying he suddenly left them, the procession standing
silently staring after him as he took his way through the woods in the
dusky red shadows of the autumnal gloaming.

Aurelia's vaunted home was indeed a poor place,--not even the rude
though substantial log-cabin common to the region. It was a flimsy
shanty of boards, and except for its rickety porch was more like a box
than a house. It had its perch on a jutting eminence, where it seemed
the familiar of the skies, so did the clouds and winds circle about it.
Through the great gateway of Sunrise Gap it commanded a landscape of a
scope that might typify a world, in its multitude of mountain ranges, in
the intricacies of its intervening valleys, in the glittering coils
of its water-courses. Basil would sometimes sink into deep silences,
overpowered by the majesty of nature in this place. After a long hiatus
the bow would tremble and falter on the strings as if overawed for a
time; presently the theme would strengthen, expand, resound with large
meaning, and then he would send forth melodies that he had never before
played or heard, his own dream, the reflection of that mighty mood of
nature in the limpid pool of his receptive mind.

Around were rocks, crags, chasms,--the fields which nourished the family
lay well from the verge, within the purlieus of the limited mountain
plateau. He had sought to persuade himself that it was to save all the
arable land for tillage that he had placed his house and door-yard here,
but both he and Aurelia were secretly aware of the subterfuge; he would
fain be always within the glamour of the prospect through Sunrise Gap!

Their interlocutor had truly deemed that the woman should have been
earlier at home cooking the supper. Dusk had deepened to darkness long
before the meal smoked upon the board. The spinning-wheel had begun to
whir for her evening stint when other hill-folks had betaken themselves
to bed. Basil puffed his pipe before the fire; the flicker and
flare pervaded every nook of the bright little house. Strings of
red-pepper-pods flaunted in festoons from the beams; the baby slumbered
under a gay quilt in his rude cradle, never far from his mother's hand