d man had evidently been a reckless
desperado in other days, and many in the village suspected strongly
that he had once been a pirate. He was addicted to drinking, and now
and then, when bitten by the adder, would talk strangely. He would
commence narrating some wonderful hurricane he had experienced on the
Spanish Main, and would launch out upon the number of times he had
headed boarding parties, and once, in a state of great intoxication at
the village tavern, he rambled off into a story about his having made
an old man walk the plank. He would, however, check himself on all
these occasions before he went far. He became involved in a fight one
time with a great lounging fellow about the village, whose propensity
to bully was the only salient point in his character. They
clinched--the old man was thrown, and the bystanders had just time to
pull the bully away, to prevent a long keen knife in the grasp of
Murdock (for such was the old man's name) from being plunged into his
side.

Suddenly the idiot-boy disappeared. The passers-by had frequently seen
him (for he was an industrious lad) working in the little patch
belonging to the cabin, but from a certain time he was seen no more,
and the old man lived alone in his cabin. A change, too, gradually
grew over him. He became silent and deeply melancholy, and his
countenance settled into an expression of stern, rigid sorrow. His eye
was awful. Wild and red, it seemed as if you could look through it
into a brain on fire.

At last he commenced rubbing his right hand with his left. There he
would fasten his gaze, and chafe with the most determined energy. He
would frequently stop and hold the hand to his eye for a moment, and
then recommence his strange work. To the inquiries of the village
people concerning his son, he would give no answer. He would roll upon
the inquirer for an instant his fierce, mad eye, and then prosecute
his mysterious chafing more rigorously than ever.

Things continued so for about a fortnight after the disappearance of
the idiot, when one dark night the village was alarmed by the
appearance of flames from the clearing. Hurrying to the spot, they
were just in time to see the blazing roof of the hut fall in. The next
morning disclosed, amidst the smouldering ashes, a few charred bones.
Murdock was not again seen or heard of from that night.

The glade is now quiet and lonely as if human passions had never been
unloosed there in the terrific crime o