roundings, and indeed he did not
try. He only rubbed his eyes with his fists and said again and again that
he wanted his mother. He was seated on a small stone pillar, a stalagmite
in a limestone cavern, where there were many such pillars and pendants of
like material hanging from the roof, all most dimly glimpsed in the
torch-light against an infinitude of blackness. The men who had brought
him hither, and others whom he had not heretofore seen, were busied about
a dismantled stone furnace, gathering up such poor belongings as had
escaped the wreckings of the revenue force. Now and then a glitter from
the fragments of the copper still and the sections of the coils of the
worm marked the course their ravages had taken, and all the chill,
cavernous air was filled with the sickly odor of singlings and the
fermenting mash adhering to the broken staves of the great riven tanks,
called the beer-tubs. The moonlight came into this dark place at the
further end, for this was one of the many caves among the crags that
overhang the Little Tennessee River, and once, looking toward the jagged
portal, Archie saw a sail, white in the beams on the lustrous current,
and asked if they were going in that boat to his mother, for, he said, he
knew that she did not live in this cellar.

"Yes, yes," Clenk assured him. They were making ready to leave now,
though not in that boat. "An' look-a-hyar! What a pretty! Ye kin hev this
ter play with ef ye will be good."

He led the little boy up to a tallow dip blazing on the head of a barrel,
that he might have light to examine the token. It was a small bit of the
cavernous efflorescence, which, growing on subterranean walls, takes
occasionally definite form, some specimens resembling a lily, others
being like a rose; the child tried feebly to be grateful, and put it with
care into one of the pockets of his little red coat--his pockets in which
he had once felt such plethora of pride!

VI.

When next he saw the river the lunar lustre had dulled on the currents.
No more the long lines of shimmering light trailing off into the deep
shadow of the wooded banks, no more the tremulous reflection of the moon,
swinging like some supernal craft in the great lacustrine sweep where the
stream broadens in rounding the point. Now a filmy veil was over all, yet
the night was so fine that the light filtered through the mist, and
objects were still discernible, though on