in his cellar, looking at each yellow eagle lovingly, and
passing his finger over the milled rim of each new-minted coin, while
the tallow candle melts down on the bench beside him.

I could close my eyes and see a black mass going down in the yellow
water, with here and there a bullock drifting exhausted in the eddy, or
heaps of bloated bodies piled up on a sandbar of the Valley River. And
there, with my eyes wide open, was the drove spreading out along the
hillside as it passed in between the two chestnut bar-posts.

I was as happy as a man can be when his Armada sails in with its sunlit
canvas; and yet, had that Armada gone to pieces on a coast, I think my
tears over its wreckage had been the deeper emotion. Our conception of
disaster outrides by far our conception of felicity.

It is a thing of striking significance that old, wise poets have on
occasion written of hell so vividly that we hear the fire crackle and
see the bodies of the lost sizzling; but not one of them, burning the
candle of genius at both ends, has ever been able to line out a heaven
that a man would live in if he were given the key to it.

Ump came along after the last of the cattle and burst into a great
laugh. "Damme," he said, "you're as purty a pair of muskrats as ever
chawed a root. Why don't you put up the bars instead of settin' gawkin'
at the cattle! They're all there."

"Suppose they were not all there?" said I.

"Quiller," said he, "I'm not goin' back over any burnt bridges. When the
devil throws a man in a sink hole an' the Lord comes along an' pulls him
out, that man ought to go on about his business an' not hang around the
place until the devil gits back."

Jud got down from his horse and began to lay up the bars. "But," said
he, "suppose we hadn't split the bunch?"

"Jud," answered the hunchback, "hell's full of people who spent their
lives a-'sposin'."

Jud jammed the top bar into the chestnut post. "Still," he persisted,
"where would we a been now?"

"If you must know," said Ump, "we'd a been heels up in the slime of the
Valley with the catfish playin' pussy-in-the-corner around the butt of
our ears."

We trotted over to the tavern, flung the bridle-reins across the
hitching post, and went bursting into the house. Roy was wiping his oak
table. "Mother Hubbard," cried the hunchback, "set out your bones. We're
as empty as bee gums."

The man stopped with his hands resting on the cloth. "God save us!" he
said, "if you