It was a cheerful scene within, glimpsed through the half-open door, contrasting with the wild, dark world without, and its strange glares and fluctuating glooms and far-off stars and vast admeasurements of loneliness. The old woman knitted and nodded in her rocking-chair; Jessup and Mr. Sayles smoked their pipes, and ever and anon the old man began anew to detail—the pipe-stem between his teeth—the legends that his grandfather had learned from the Indians of the hidden silver mines in these mountains, found long ago, and visited stealthily, the secret of the locality dying with its discoverer, who thus carried out of the world more than he brought with him. Their eyes gloated on the fire as they talked, seeing more than the leaping yellow flames or the white heats of the coals below. It might seem as if the craving for precious metal is a natural appetite, since these men that knew naught of the world, of the influence of wealth, of its powers, of its infinite divergences, should be a-hungered for it in their primitive fastnesses, and dream of it by night. “On the top of the Big Smoky Mountings, on a spot whar ye kin see the Tennessee River in three places at once,” said the old man, repeating the formula of the tradition. Jessup puffed his pipe a moment in silence, watching the wreathing smoke. “I know twenty sech spots,” he said presently. The old man sighed and shifted his position. “Me too,” he admitted. “But thar it be,” he observed, “fur the man ez air a-comin’.” They fell silent, perhaps both projecting a mental ideal of the man of the future, and the subservient circumstance that should lead him to stand one day on these stupendous heights, with sunshine and clouds about him and the world at his feet, and to look upon the mystic curves of the river, trebly visible, strike his heel upon the ground, and triumphantly proclaim, “It is here!”