ent that
made Elijah's blood turn to gall.

"Thee'st forgotten me, thou darned owld liar that thou art!" said he,
shaking his fist savagely at the fern-clad hill-side, where Hate
presumably was watching from her lair.

On which he heard a chilling whisper at his elbow: "You shall have your
wish, as sure as death!"

Elijah heard the loud thump, thump of his heart. But an instant after,
his pulse danced buoyantly, and he went about his work chuckling grimly
to himself.

But while 'Miah's life was harvesting happiness, as his nets gathered
abundantly the harvest of the sea, Elijah's life on his farm on the
hill-side appeared to be stifling among the stones and thistles, and a
sour and acid leanness seemed eating up his heart.

It was as if Hate had shot her arrows blindly, and they had struck and
rankled in the wrong breast.

With Elijah Trevorrow nothing seemed to prosper. He might rise early
and go to bed late, he might pinch and pare as relentlessly as he
pleased, every year of his life he grew leaner and poorer, till the
scowl on his features deepened permanently among its lines, and in the
end transformed his features as completely as a mask.

He was no more like the clear-eyed, whistling young farmer who had gone
a-wooing Dorcas among the rustling wheat-fields, than the wrinkled tree,
with its heart rotted out of it, is like the green young sapling in the
bravery of its spring.

Ever watching hungrily to see Misfortune seize his rival and set her
teeth thirstily in the very pulse of his life, Elijah held aloof from
commerce with his neighbours, sour and discontented, and wishing each
day to end, in the hope that on the morrow he might see the evil he
desired.

Presently there went a whisper through the tiny hamlet that Elijah
Trevorrow was a bit touched _here_--the villagers tapping their brows
significantly as they spoke.

"He do talk as ef Hate es a woman, an' he've seed her. Up in that owld
fogou he've mit her, he do say. An' he's all'ys sayin' she ha'nt keeped
her word to un. Whatever do 'a mayne, weth 'es gashly owld tales?"

'Miah, whose name had got mixed up in the tale, one day called at the
lonely farmhouse, in order to see Elijah and reason with him if he
could.

But Elijah, as 'Miah approached, set the dogs on him savagely, and the
fisherman was obliged precipitately to beat a retreat.

At last, one day in the depth of winter, when the hills were white with
whirling snowdrifts, Elijah Tre