The scene at the bottom was not unlike what Seth’s fancy had painted it, adding the terrible novelties of the night to a spot he had known from boyhood. Half-shaded even in the noon sunlight by overhanging branches from the towering, perpendicular sides of the glen, the miniature valley lay, a narrow stretch of poor, close-cropped grass, with the spiral, faded mullein stalks, the soft brown clumps of brake, the straggling, bloomless thistles, and even some tufts of glowing golden-rod, which push their way into unfrequented pasture-lands and encompass their sterility. The stream, which once had been a piscatorial glory of the section, but now, robbed of its water and its life by distant clearings, mills and reservoirs, wandered sadly and shallowly on an unnoted course, divided itself here to skirt each side of the gulf with a contemptible rivulet--the two coming together abruptly at the mouth of the low stone culvert, and vanishing into its dark recesses, above which rose, sloping steeply, the high embankment of the road traversing the ravine. It was over this embankment that horses, carriage and owner had precipitately pitched; it was at its base, on the swail and gravel of the stream’s edge, that the wreck lay, surrounded by a little knot of men. Vertical gashes in the earth down the bank, with broken branches and tom roots, marked the awful track of the descent; the waters of the brook to the right, dammed by the body of the horse killed in the fall, had overflowed the sands and made muddy rivulets across to the culvert. The Coroner turned with obvious vexation at the sound of the brothers’ approach. “I thought I give word--” he began; then, recognizing the newcomers, added, without altering his peremptory, officious tone: “It’s all right; you can come now, if you want to. The gentlemen of the jury have completed their labors for the present. I was on the pint of adjourning the ink-west.” The brothers joined the jurors, and dumbly surveyed the spectacle at their feet. One of the grays lay across the rivulet; the other, more recently dead, was piled awkwardly upon its mate’s neck and shoulders, in an unnatural heap. The front portions of the buggy, scratched but not smashed, were curiously reared in the air, by reason of the pole being driven deep into the soft earth, between the horses; the rear wheels and the seat, broken off and riven by the violence of the shock, were imbedded in the marsh underneath. On the higher ground, close in front of the brothers, lay something decorously covered with horse-blankets, which they comprehended with a sinking of the heart. “He lay in theer, part under the hind wheels ’n’ part under the nigh hoss,” explained the Coroner, with dignity. “The fall was enough to brek his neck twenty times over, let alone the hosses may’ve kicked him on the way down. We hev viewed the remains, ’n’ we’ve decided--