not a primeval forest, but a second growth
of chestnuts and poplars and maples. Through the woods there ran at
intervals long lines of broken rock, covered with moss--the ruins,
evidently, of ancient stone fences. The land must have been, in former
days, a farm, inhabited, cultivated, the home of human hopes and desires
and labours, but now relapsed into solitude and wilderness. What could
the life have been among these rugged and inhospitable Highlands, on
this niggard and reluctant soil? Where was the house that once sheltered
the tillers of this rude corner of the earth?

Here, perhaps, in the little clearing into which I now emerged. A couple
of decrepit apple-trees grew on the edge of it, and dropped their
scanty and gnarled fruit to feast the squirrels. A little farther on, a
straggling clump of ancient lilacs, a bewildered old bush of sweetbrier,
the dark-green leaves of a cluster of tiger-lilies, long past blooming,
marked the grave of the garden. And here, above this square hollow in
the earth, with the remains of a crumbling chimney standing sentinel
beside it, here the house must have stood. What joys, what sorrows once
centred around this cold and desolate hearth-stone? What children went
forth like birds from this dismantled nest into the wide world? What
guests found refuge----

"Take care! stand back! There is a rattlesnake in the old cellar."

The voice, even more than the words, startled me. I drew away suddenly,
and saw, behind the ruins of the chimney, a man of an aspect so striking
that to this day his face and figure are as vivid in my memory as if it
were but yesterday that I had met him.

He was dressed in black, the coat of a somewhat formal cut, a long
cravat loosely knotted in his rolling collar. His head was bare, and
the coal-black hair, thick and waving, was in some disorder. His face,
smooth and pale, with high forehead, straight nose, and thin, sensitive
lips--was it old or young? Handsome it certainly was, the face of a man
of mark, a man of power. Yet there was something strange and wild about
it. His dark eyes, with the fine wrinkles about them, had a look of
unspeakable remoteness, and at the same time an intensity that seemed
to pierce me through and through. It was as if he saw me in a dream,
yet measured me, weighed me with a scrutiny as exact as it was at bottom
indifferent.

But his lips were smiling, and there was no fault to be found, at
least, with his manner. He had rise