In the arrogations of poor humanity of the higher things, in the infinite breadth of the claim of an immortal soul, vast incongruities meet. The extreme might seem reached in the ignorant mountaineer, the moonshiner obnoxious to the law, the poverty-stricken laborer, seeing with the wild preëmptions of fancy this star, all newly and miraculously alight in the sky, as charged with some mysterious relation to his infinitesimally petty and restricted life. But once admit the idea of an immortal spirit, heir of all knowledge, made a little lower than the angels, to be crowned with glory and honor, the climax of development, and even the splendors of the star are as naught. Larrabee had no cultivated sense of comparison. His tenacious nature laid hold upon the idea of an intimate personal intention, a sign in the heavens, with a blunt and stalwart appropriation. He rose swiftly to his feet. So different a spirit animated him that it seemed a different path from that which he had trod as he had plodded slowly up the mountain, with hesitating steps and frequent uncertain pauses. Now he went deftly down the rugged and far darker way, brushing amongst bushes and vines, and be-showered with the perfumed drops that his hasty transit shook from their boughs; swiftly slipping through the shifting mists that now hid the sky, and again revealed the glister of that great star amidst a myriad others at the vanishing point of a perspective of seemingly precipitous white ascents, as the uncertain light cleft the glimmering vapors. He looked up to it, as it were, through a defile between these impalpable white cliffs, from the dark abysses of the night; and then the gauzy medium interposed, and without the faint light of the stars the night was black again. His pace did not slacken. He went forward as confidently in the darkness as if he were led by the definite capacity of sight, trusting to that instinct of woodcraft almost as keen as sense itself. Sometimes, indeed, his foot struck against a branch, torn by the wind from the trees and left to wither in the rugged path; or the splash of a pool beneath his inadvertent step broke the silence of his journey, as these unaccustomed incidents of the way asserted their presence as obstacles. He never hesitated, nor doubted, nor deviated. He seemed led through the darkness by his will. He was aware in some mysterious sort of the looming propinquity of great trees or the locality of jagged rocks; he avoided the verge of cliffs and abysses with that keen, accurate discernment of an unascertained faculty, as a somnambulist might have done. As far as his recognized intelligence was concerned, he was down in the Cove before he knew it, for the way was still sloping, the footing rocky and uneven. A long slanting burnished gleam of orange light appearing suddenly before him, revealing the white mists, and making the darkness a definite visible blackness rather than merely