It was scarcely a minute that he stood there, but long enough for a tender outline of the circumstances of the past year to rise in his memory. A rustling at the broken lattice, a sudden thrill through the iron frame of the watching man, a glimpse of a sweet face--no, it was only a fancy. The house was still, and old and desolate. It stared at him like a death's head. Big Medicine raised his eyes toward heaven, which was now golden and flashing resplendently with sunset glories. High up, as if almost touching the calm sky, a great blue heron was toiling heavily westward. Taking the course chosen by the lone bird, Big Medicine went away, and the places that knew him once know him no more forever. THE VENUS OF BALHINCH. When I returned from Europe with a finished education, I found that my fortune also was finished in the most approved modern style, so I left New York and drifted westward in search of employment. At length I came to Indiana, and, having not even a cent left, and mustering but one presentable suit of clothes, I looked about me in a hungry, half desperate sort of way, till I pounced upon the school in Balhinch. Now Balhinch is not a town, nor a cross-road place, nor a post-office--it is simply a neighborhood in the southwestern corner of Union Township, Montgomery County--a neighborhood _sui generis_, stowed away in the breaks of Sugar Creek, containing as good, quiet, law-abiding folk as can be found anywhere outside of Switzerland. My school was a small one in numbers, but the pupils ranged from four to six feet three in altitude, and well proportioned. The most advanced class had thumbed along pretty well through the spelling book. I need not take up your time with the school, however, for it has nothing at all to do with my story, excepting merely to explain how I came to be in Balhinch, in the State of Indiana. My first sight of Susie Adair was on Sunday at the Methodist prayer meeting. I was sitting with my back to a window and facing the door of the log meeting house when she entered. It was July--a hot glary day, but a steady wind blew cool and sweet from the southwest, bringing in all sorts of woodland odors. The grasshoppers were chirruping in the little timothy field hard by, and over in a bit of woodland pasture a swarm of blue jays were worrying a crow, keeping up an incessant squeaking and chattering. The dumpy little class leader--the only little man in Balhinch--had just begun to give out the hymn "Love is the sweetest bud that blows, Its beauties never die, On earth among the saints it grows And ripens in the sky," &c., when Susie came in. Ben Crane was sitting by me. He nudged me with his elbow and whispered: "How's that 'ere for poorty?"