We now descend the ridge upon which we have been for some time, to a glade at the foot. The sweet haze belonging to the season is shimmering over it. It is a broad space surrounded on all sides by the forest. The first settler in this part of the country had "located" himself here, and this was his little clearing. His hut stood on an eminence in one corner. He lived there a number of years. He was a reserved, unsocial man, making the forest his only haunt, and his rifle his only companion. He was at last found dead in his cabin. Alone and unattended he had died, keeping to the last aloof from human society. The hut was next occupied by a singular couple--an old man and his idiot son. The father was of a fierce, savage temper, but seemed very fond, although capriciously so, of his child. Sometimes he would treat him with the greatest tenderness, then again, at some wayward action of the idiot, he would burst upon him with an awful explosion of passion. The old 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.