shed and unfinished work heaped up like snowdrifts,--a
cemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lantern
glimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are having their fodder
betimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearest
rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate old
cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along
the gray of the serpentine turnpike,--a cart, with the driver lashing
a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and is lost in the
forest.

Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the
horizon.

Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun to
twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itself
known to the doves in the stone belfry of the South Church. The
patches of cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarse
grass of the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and the
mill-pond--it will be steel-blue later--is as smooth and white as if
it had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum's Marble
Yard. Through a row of button-woods on the northern skirt of the
village is seen a square, lap-streaked building, painted a
disagreeable brown, and surrounded on three sides by a platform,--one
of seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian heads on a
branch thread of the Great Sagamore Railway.

Listen! That is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart as it
begins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curdled smoke gives
evidence that the thrifty housewife--or, what is rarer in Stillwater,
the hired girl--has lighted the kitchen fire.

The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a small court--the
last house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quite
alone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefully trained ivy over the
porch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps,
intimate that the place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the little
schooner which acts as weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now
heading due west, has a new top-sail. It is a story-and-a-half
cottage, with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous,
unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full
upon it. The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as
those on the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to beat
in vain at the casements of this silent house, which has a curiously
sullen and defiant air, as if it h