ossibility of reaching her with his voice.

"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
might help you!"

Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face
was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
of her very slumber to his guidance.

Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.

"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her
back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!"

"Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."

He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with
his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
seat.

"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule. "Mine, by the right of the
strongest spirit!"

In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking a