Although doubts and fears still lurked in his mind, he found himself waiting for dawn, not with hope or impatience, but with the dull resolution of reluctant decision. He could hardly have said why, but he experienced a disappointment as he noted the weather signs. The mists thickened and pervaded the moonbeams in gigantic wavering spectral effects. Over toward the Great Smoky they slowly tended, those veiled mystic figures, with diaphanous trailing garments, and with sometimes a lifted hand as if to swear by the heaven it almost touched. He watched the throngs grow denser, lose the similitude of individuality, take on the aspect of lowering clouds. The moonbeams glittered faintly and failed. When the day broke at last, the light expressed itself only in the dull visibility of the enveloping vapors. Not the depths of Hazel Valley, not the slopes of Big Injun Mounting, could be seen as he clambered out of the niche and down upon the road. Even the log at its verge serving as a curb seemed a sort of defense against the usurping immateriality which had engulfed the rest of the world. He heard the moisture dripping from the summit of the craggy heights; sometimes, too, the quick, tumultuous patter of a shower in Hazel Valley, as if a cloud had lost its balance on the brink of the mountain and had fallen into the depths beneath. He trudged along, seeing nothing but the blank inexpressiveness of the encompassing fog, with only the vaguest divination of the locality and the distance. “I wouldn’t feel so weighted ef the weather would clear,” he said. Once he paused, suddenly recollecting that the county court was in session, and that Squire White was doubtless at Shaftesville. When he thought of the unaccustomed scenes of the town, the people, their questions and comments, he wavered again. Then he remembered Alethea. “She ’lowed ’twould be jestice an’ the bes’ ez I could do ennyhows, an’ somehows the critter ’pears ter be right in her jedgmints. So I reckon I’ll jes’ ’bide by Lethe’s word.” Presently the mists began to lift. He could see along the green aisles of the forest how they wavered and shifted in the tops of the trees. Everywhere the flowers were blooming,—the trumpet blossom and the jewel-weed, the delicate lilac “Christmas flower,” the “mountain snow,” the red cardinal blossoms, and, splendid illumination of the woods, the Chilhowee lily. All along the wayside, silvery cascades tumbled over the rocks amongst fantasies of ferns, and the laurel and the ivy crowded the banks of the torrent. When he was fairly in the valley, fences bordered the road, with poke-berries darkly glittering in corners crowded with weeds. He was nearing Shaftesville now. A little house appeared here and there, a stretch of open land, stacks of fodder, an occasional passer.