they warmed themselves together at the fire, which
extended its bright wall along the whole front of their wigwam. As they
observed the various and contrasted figures that made up the assemblage,
each man looking like a caricature of himself, in the unsteady light
that flickered over him, they came mutually to the conclusion, that
an odder society had never met, in city or wilderness, on mountain or
plain.

The eldest of the group, a tall, lean, weather-beaten man, some sixty
years of age, was clad in the skins of wild animals, whose fashion of
dress he did well to imitate, since the deer, the wolf, and the
bear, had long been his most intimate companions. He was one of those
ill-fated mortals, such as the Indians told of, whom, in their early
youth, the Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness, and became the
passionate dream of their existence. All who visited that region knew
him as the Seeker and by no other name. As none could remember when he
first took up the search, there went a fable in the valley of the Saco,
that for his inordinate lust after the Great Carbuncle, he had been
condemned to wander among the mountains till the end of time, still with
the same feverish hopes at sunrise--the same despair at eve. Near this
miserable Seeker sat a little elderly personage, wearing a high-crowned
hat, shaped somewhat like a crucible. He was from beyond the sea, a
Doctor Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into a mummy by
continually stooping over charcoal furnaces, and inhaling unwholesome
fumes during his researches in chemistry and alchemy. It was told of
him, whether truly or not, that, at the commencement of his studies, he
had drained his body of all its richest blood, and wasted it, with other
inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment--and had never
been a well man since. Another of the adventurers was Master bod
Pigsnort, a weighty merchant and selector Boston, and an elder of the
famous Mr. Norton's church. His enemies had a ridiculous story that
Master Pigsnort was accustomed to spend a whole hour after prayer time,
every morning and evening, in wallowing naked among an immense quantity
of pine-tree shillings, which were the earliest silver coinage of
Massachusetts. The fourth whom we shall notice had no name that his
companions knew of, and was chiefly distinguished by a sneer that always
contorted his thin visage, and by a prodigious pair of spectacles, which
were supposed to defo