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 of parricide--the consequent remorse merging into madness, and a fiery retributory death. Upon the grassy mound, which the frost has not yet blighted, a beautiful white rabbit has just glided. The lovely creature darts onward, then crouches--now lays his long ears flat upon his shoulders, and now points them forward in the most knowing and cunning manner. He plays there in his white, pure beauty, as if in purposed contrast to the blood-stained and guilty wretch who expired on the same spot in his flaming torture. But the little shape now points his long, rose-tinted ears in our direction, and then he does not disappear as much as melt from our sight like the vanishing of breath from polished steel. We then enter fully into the glade. One of the trees at the border is a magnificent chestnut. I remember it in June, with its rich green leaves hung over with short, braided cords of pale gold. These braided blossoms have yielded fruit most plenteously. How thickly the chestnuts, with their autumn-colored coats and gray caps, are scattered around the tree, whilst the large yellow burrs on the branches, gaping wide open, are displaying their soft velvet inner lining in which the embedded nuts have ripened, and which in their maturity they have deserted.