The same faces were seen day after day,—often enough to excite no particular remark that, whoever came or was absent, Peter Rood was here with the dawn, and night found him still strolling along the banks, looking upon the swollen floods with gloomy, insistent dark eyes, as if he were seeking to read in the writhing lines of the current the inscrutable secret of the Scolacutta River. Sometimes, with his hands in his pockets, his lowering face shadowed by his broad hat, he would silently listen to the speculations of those who found solace for the futility of the undertaking in the enlarged conjectural field which failure afforded, discussing the relative probabilities whether the body had floated down to the Tennessee River, or whether it had been engulfed by the quicksands and buried forever, or caught among the rocks of the jagged bank and wedged in, to be found some day—a ghastly skeleton—by a terrified boy, fishing or wading at low water. It was only when these bootless surmises had palled at last, through many repetitions and lack of further developments, that the ruins of the old mill asserted an interest. There seemed a strange hush on the landscape, here where the wheel would whir no more. A few timbers scattered about, a rotten old stump that had served as part of the foundation, the hopper washed up by the waters, several of the posts which had upheld the race, were all that was left of the old mill, so long the salient feature of the place that more than one mountaineer was beset with bewilderment at the sight,—the recollection of the oblique line of the roof against the mountain, the open door, the reflections in the water, having more reality than the bereft bank of the river. And now the old miller—seeming older than before—was wont to come tottering out with his stick, the gay sunshine on his long, white hair, and sit on the broken timbers, forlorn amidst the ruins of his poverty. At first his appearance created renewed excitement, and his old customers and friends pressed up to speak to him and hear what he would say, feeling a certain desire to mark the moral phenomena of loss and the fine processes of grief. But he held his clasped hands upon the stick, and silently shook his bowed gray head in his ragged old hat.