ray of the serpentine
turnpike--a cart, with the driver lashing a jaded horse. A quick wind
goes shivering by, and is lost in the forest.

Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the horizon.

Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun to
twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itself known
to the doves in the stone belfry on the South Church. The patches of
cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarse grass of
the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and the
mill-pond--it will be steel-blue later--is as smooth and white as if
it had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum's marble
yard. Through a row of buttonwoods on the northern skirt of the
village is seen a square, lap-streaked building, painted a
disagreeable brown, and surrounded on three sides by a platform--one
of seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian beads on a
branch thread of the Great Sagamore Railway.

Listen! That is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart as it
begins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curled smoke gives
evidence that the thrifty housewife--or, what is rarer in Stillwater,
the hired girl--has lighted the kitchen fire.

The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a small court--the last
house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quite
alone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefully trained ivy over the
porch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps,
intimate that the place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the little
schooner which acts as weathercock on one of the gables, and is now
heading due west, has a new topsail. It is a story-and-a-half cottage,
with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous, unpainted
shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full upon it.
The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as those on
the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to beat in vain at
the casements of this silent house, which has a curiously sullen and
defiant air, as if it had desperately and successfully barricaded
itself against the approach of morning; yet if one were standing in
the room that leads from the bedchamber on the ground floor--the room
with the latticed window--one would see a ray of light thrust through
a chink of the shutters, and pointing like a human finger at an object
which lies by the hearth.

This finger, gleaming, motionless, and aw