autifully clear, and as
transparent--though still somewhat dusky--as a wide sheet of crystal; a
few pale stars were twinkling here and there; but in the east a broad
gray streak changing on the horizon's edge to a faint straw color,
announced the sun's approach.

The whole face of the country, hill, vale, and woodland, was overspread
by an universal coat of silvery hoar-frost; thin wreaths of snowy mist
rising above the tops of the sere woodlands, throughout the whole length
of the lovely vale, indicated as clearly as though it were traced on a
map, the direction of the stream that watered it; and as we paused upon
the brow of the first hillock, and looked back toward the village, with
its white steeples and neat cottage dwellings buried in the still repose
of that early hour, with only one or two faint columns of blue smoke
worming their way up lazily into the cloudless atmosphere, a feeling of
regret--such as has often crossed my mind before, when leaving any place
wherein I have spent a few days happily, and which I never may see more
--rendered me somewhat indisposed to talk.

Something or other--it might with Harry, perhaps, have been a similar
train of thought--caused both my comrades to be more taciturn by far
than was their wont; and we had rattled over five miles of our route,
and scaled the first ridge of the hills, and dived into the wide ravine;
midway the depth of this the pretty village of Bellevale lies on the
brink of the dammed rivulet, which, a few yards below the neat stone
bridge, takes a precipitous leap of fifty feet, over a rustic wier, and
rushes onward, bounding from ledge to ledge of rifted rocks, chafing and
fretting as if it were doing a match against time, and were in danger of
losing its race.

Thus we had passed the heavy lumber wagon, with Jem and Garry perched on
a board laid across it, and the four couple of stanch hounds nestling in
the straw which Tom had provided in abundance for their comfort, before
the silence was broken by any sounds except the rattle of the wheels,
the occasional interjectional whistle of Harry to his horses, or the
flip of the well handled whip.

Just, however, as we were shooting ahead of the lumber wain, an
exclamation from Tom Draw, which should have been a sentence, had it not
been very abruptly terminated in a long rattling eructation, arrested
Archer's progress.

Pulling short up where a jog across the road, constructed--after the
damnable mode adop