Rowan and Townsend had places assigned them near the middle of the line, but as the cavalcade began to move, the human demon of unrest was missing from his place. He was to be seen at the end of the piazza at that moment, talking to Hartshorne, and no doubt making a few additional inquiries as to the character of the amiable animal he bestrode. The lawyer called out to him to "Come on!" but he answered with a wave of the hand and a shout: "Go ahead! don't wait for me! I will be with you directly!" Through the thick woods of Mount Clinton they swept up, over a bridle-path so rough as to have made the most laborious if not the most dangerous walking--over great boulders of stone lying in the very path, and apparently impossible to get over or around--over patches of corduroy road utterly defying description, except to the men who isolated Fort Donelson and planted the Swamp Angels in the marshes of Charleston--over and through gutters and gulches of slippery stone and more slippery mud--but ever ascending at a painful acclivity. The horses breathed heavily; and their riders, in the thick and foggy air, did little better. They caught occasional glimpses through the trees, down the sudden slopes at the left, of the thick mist rolling below, but could see nothing else to remind them of the height they were attaining; and as the dense fog swept in their faces, and the trees dripped moisture on them when they swept beneath their branches, and the path grew more and more desolate and difficult, they grew silent, the whole cavalcade, apparently by common consent. There are aspects in which Nature looks and feels too solemn for the light word and the flippant jest; and the man who cannot be awed beyond his ordinary mood when standing under the edge of the sheet of Niagara, or beside the sea when it is lashed into resistless fury, or in gale and mist on the bleak, bare, desolate mountains of the North, should never insult the grand and the terrible by going into their presence! And yet all persons, who have true reverence in their hearts, are not always awed beyond themselves, even in the most impressive of situations: as witness, to some degree, the incidents following. They had surmounted the first acclivity, perhaps a mile from the Crawford, and were commencing a slight descent which made every rider look to the horse's feet and ride with a slight tremor,--when the stillness was suddenly broken in a manner which almost curdled the blood of the timid and needed a second reassurance for even the boldest.