AT this time, I slept, or lay down to sleep, on a couple of good-sized chairs in the kitchen, with a cushion laid along them, which had come from my uncle’s pew in Sunbury church. He had established a new cushion there, on the strength of my marriage and Kitty’s good clothes; and the old one, being stuffed with sound horsehair, was not to be despised when upside down. And to save all risk of rolling off, I set it against the front legs of the dresser. The door of the room was left wide open, and the front door also, unless the night was windy; for I had nothing to lose, having lost my all; and I only wished that anybody would come and try to rob me. It would have been bad for him, unless he had been either Hercules, of Ulysses; for I was armed with recklessness, and eager to tackle any open foe. Nervousness (such as a happy man may feel, when he hears a strange noise in the dead of the night) was an unknown power to me now, and I would have fought, like a bull-dog in his own kennel, and enjoyed it. This was not the proper turn of mind for a young man to indulge in. That I knew as well as could he; but the blame lay elsewhere. Although I was very stiff and sore from the bruises of that awkward fall, I went at daylight to examine the place, where that stranger must have stood. The ground was dry and hard just there; but I found enough to show me that I had not been deceived by any trick of the imagination. Not only had the soil been trodden by a foot unlike my own, but the thick mat of the _Thuja_ tree had some of the lobed leaves (which composed it and stood together like moss compressed), ruffled and crushed into one another, as if by the thrust of a heavy form. Then I went to the place where I had stood over against the peach-tree, and put my hat on a nail to represent my height, and returning to the clipped tree gazed through the nick of the fiddle at it, just as the face had gazed at me. I was obliged to stoop, to bring my eyes to the level at which those eyes had been; which showed that my visitor had been of some three or four inches lower stature, probably not more than five feet ten. I could not trace his footsteps far, nor make out what kind of boots he wore, except that there was no sign of hob-nails, such as all our workmen had. It struck me that a man with such a face was not very likely to hurry himself, and the ground bore no traces of hasty flight, neither were the branches of the plum-trees (through which he must have retreated) broken. Probably he had retired at his leisure, while I was disabled from following. There were no signs of entrance to be discovered at or near the door into Love Lane; all our men had left work at the time of his visit, and no one had seen any stranger.