"All right," bawled a voice from the shore. And slowly the great raft, a hundred and twenty feet long and forty wide, swung in from the flood after two trials had been made to break the speed. Closer and closer to the bank, away from the force of the current, until alongside she was safely secured with a double hawser, a prisoner under the guardianship and control of two massive oaks. The immense oars were swung clear of the water and their handles lashed to the centre-pieces. Up over the creek bank, stumbling through thick underbrush and over fallen trees, came the hardy crew and at length gained the turnpike. The weather in the meantime had grown colder and the rain changed to falling snow. The wind had fallen in its violence. Onward stumbled the crew, then at length up a slight elevation, through a covered bridge, and the lights, twinkling through many small windows, flashed before their eyes. It was the town of Burgtown, famed for its two rows of log houses, each having an upper story, and doubly famed for its renowned hotel of sawn timber and its hospitable but talkative host; famed also for the scholarship and mystery surrounding its founder. Scholarship and mystery! Yes, scholarship, for no one could withstand the logic of the Reverend Mr. Burg, and his tall, dark form, his deep eyes with their unfathomable look, was enough to awe even the stoutest. Mysteriousness? Yes, mysteriousness, for he had come in the night and had gone in the night. He was like Melchizedek in one respect, no one knew his father or his mother, no one knew his birthplace, and no one knew his end. There was a story rife among some of the town people that he had been guilty of some unministerial conduct in the neighbourhood of Standing Stone, thought it best for him to put the Alleghenies between himself and his old location, and had accordingly travelled with more speed than elegance to the Lycamahoning, where with the aid of a ploughline he had plotted and laid out the town. He was gone before the settlers that poured in became fully acquainted with him. Two years had elapsed since then and people remembered little of him with the exception of Peter Burke, the tavern keeper, and it seemed that Burke's knowledge increased with the years, and Burg became in the annals of his mind a demigod, a sort of modern Romulus, whose figure and deeds became larger and mightier as they reached into the dimness of the past.