rs but
myself are gone, it seems so still. The great house is yet unoccupied,
and likely to remain so; and he who looks through its western window
may still be startled by the weird image of himself. As I lingered
round it, to-day, beneath the winter sunlight, the snow drifted
pitilessly past its ivied windows, and so hushed my footsteps that I
scarce knew which was the phantom, myself or my reflection, and
wondered if the medical student would not argue me out of existence
next.

This is the end of my story. If I sought for a moral, it would be hard
to attach one to a thing so slight. It could only be this, that shadow
and substance are always ready to link themselves, in unexpected ways,
against the diseased imagination; and that remorse can make the most
transparent crystal into a mirror for its sin.

A DRIFT-WOOD FIRE

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and salt and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule."
_A Lyke-Wake Dirge_.

The October days grow rapidly shorter, and brighten with more
concentrated light. It is but half past five, yet the sun dips redly
behind Conanicut, the sunset-gun booms from our neighbor's yacht, the
flag glides down from his mainmast, and the slender pennant, running
swiftly up the opposite halyards, dances and flickers like a flame, and
at last perches, with dainty hesitation, at the mast-head. A tint of
salmon-color, burnished into long undulations of lustre, overspreads
the shallower waves; but a sober gray begins to steal in beneath the
sunset rays, and will soon claim even the brilliant foreground for its
own. Pile a few more fragments of drift-wood upon the fire in the great
chimney, little maiden, and then couch yourself before it, that I may
have your glowing childhood as a foreground for those heaped relics of
shipwreck and despair. You seem, in your scarlet boating-dress, Annie,
like some bright tropic bird, alit for a moment beside that other bird
of the tropics, flame.

Thoreau thought that his temperament dated from an earlier period than
the agricultural, because he preferred woodcraft to gardening; and it
is also pleasant to revert to the period when men had invented neither
saws nor axes, but simply picked up their fuel in forests or on
ocean-shores. Fire is a thing which comes so near us, and combines
itself so closely with our life, that we enjoy it best when we work for
it in some way, so that o