er Wyatt was scarcely welcomed back to life by the denizens of the
cove generally with the enthusiasm attendant on the first moments of his
resuscitation, so to speak. He never forgot the solemn ecstasy of that
experience, and in later years he was wont to annul any menace of
discord with his wife by the warning, half jocose, half tender: "Ye hed
better mind; ye'll be sorry some day fur treatin' me so mean. Remember,
I hev viewed ye a-weepin' over my grave before now."

A reformation, however complete and salutary, works no change of
identity, and although he developed into an orderly, industrious,
law-abiding citizen, his prankish temperament remained recognizable in
the fantastic fables which he delighted to recount at some genial
fireside of what he had seen and heard as a ghost.

"'Pears like, Watt, ye hed more experiences whenst dead than living',"
said an auditor, as these stories multiplied.

"I did, fur a fack," Watt protested. "I war a powerful onchancy, onquiet
ghost. I even did my courtin' whilst in my reg'lar line o' business
a-harntin' a graveyard."

A CHILHOWEE LILY

Tall, delicate, and stately, with all the finished symmetry and
distinction that might appertain to a cultivated plant, yet sharing that
fragility of texture and peculiar suggestion of evanescence
characteristic of the unheeded weed as it flowers, the Chilhowee lily
caught his eye. Albeit long familiar, the bloom was now invested with a
special significance and the sight of it brought him to a sudden pause.

The cluster grew in a niche on the rocky verge of a precipice beetling
over the windings of the rugged primitive road on the slope of the
ridge. The great pure white bloom, trumpet-shaped and crowned with its
flaring and many-cleft paracorolla, distinct against the densely blue
sky, seemed the more ethereal because of the delicacy of its stalk, so
erect, so inflexibly upright. About it the rocks were at intervals green
with moss, and showed here and there heavy ocherous water stain. The
luxuriant ferns and pendant vines in the densely umbrageous tangle of
verdure served to heighten by contrast the keen whiteness of the flower
and the isolation of its situation.

Ozias Crann sighed with perplexity as he looked, and then his eye
wandered down the great bosky slope of the wooded mountain where in
marshy spots, here and there, a sudden white flare in the shadows
betokened the Chilhowee lily, flowering in myraids, holding out lur