He was conscious of sustaining the steady, sedate gaze of the nocturnal fowl even when the whole world would disappear as with a bound into the depths of darkness. As if the sound had been restrained by the presence of light, the tumult of rain would seem redoubled upon the roof. The unmannerly elements evidently disturbed no one else in the house. It was as silent as if no life beat within the walls. The very dogs were still. One of them, a fat, callow fellow, with an ill-appreciated sense of a joke, roused them once by facetiously snapping at a sleeping confrère's tail, set wagging by the propitious happenings of dreamland. Whether it was that he had interrupted the gustful gnawing of a visionary bone, or simply that his elder was of a vicious temperament, he was soundly cuffed, rolled over on his fat, round sides, and sent shrieking under the house. He came out after some indulgence of vocal woe on a piercing key, and, perceiving Kenniston, sought to make his acquaintance. Being a shaggy shepherd, his rain-laden hair diffused a peculiarly canine odor throughout the little room; he was used to rebuffs, and it required but a single tweak of the ear to send him, depressed and discouraged, to prosaic slumbers among his kindred. The lightnings failed. The world was plunged into unbroken gloom. The hours wore on into the deeps of the night. Once, as Kenniston was on the point of losing himself in sleep, he heard a shrill blood-curdling cry, searching out every nerve of repulsion in his body,--a panther shrieking from the terraces of his castle in the air. Even the fierce dogs, lifting their heads to listen, only whined and huddled closer together. When at last he dreamed, his mind clung close to the theme that held his waking thoughts. It was of processioning those wild acres of mountain fastnesses, and the serpentine lengths of the surveyor's chain seemed alive as the chain-bearers dragged it writhing through the grass. And again he was taking off the hospitable roof beneath which he slept, and riving off the doors, and somehow Cap'n Lucy was curiously helpless to resist this desolation of his roof-tree. But the man in the corner was plotting against him, and seeking to excite public animosity; and while he was busy in counterplotting, suddenly Julia appeared, with a strange face, subtle and insidious and sinister, leading the panther which he had heard filling the night with terror. And he was frightened, and awoke. II.