Already the song was faint; already the echoes were fitful. The wind was harping in the pines above his head; he glanced up to see them gently stirring; a great buzzard majestically circled in the blue sky; a mist on the mountain side vanished, as the broad flare of the sun encountered its ethereal pallors, like some belated ghost that in these solitudes had braved the monitory cock-crow. “He’ll be powerful s’prised when he does get thar,” he muttered, “an’ that’s all!” He spoke aloud, his anxious canvassing resulting in reassurance. He laughed a little, his thin lips curving. “He’s a mos’ survigrous fool;” he shook his head in contemplating the strength of the folly that Jepson harbored. “He ain’t goin’ ter sense nuthin’. He’ll bound round hyar an’ talk ’bout the Lord, when he air so fur from heaven ez the Lord hisself can’t hear him. An’ ennyhow, he’ll git ’rested so soon that he won’t hev much chance ter wonder an’ talk. An’ I’ll light out ter let the folks in Brumsaidge know ez he be a-travelin’ round an’ a-purtendin’ ter be a-goin’ thar, fur mebbe he won’t go ter his cabin arter all.” This cabin of Jepson’s was well out of sight from the Settlement, and was in fact some miles distant. It stood on the slope of the deep trough in the mighty range which was called Broomsedge Cove, but the characteristic topography of the locality had given way, and the torrent that, long and sinuous, was a feature of the broader spaces, lay here in a chasm-like valley and wore the semblance of a lakelet in the abyss below, so completely did jutting spurs of the mountain conceal its further vagrant course. It was a wild spot, with its rocky bit of pasture, its “gyarden,” its slanting fields. Above the little log cabin the great, wooded, gray, craggy steeps towered immutably; below, the abrupt declivity slanted to the clifty banks of the simulated lake in the gorge. In certain states of the atmosphere, one standing in the weed-grown garden might think to put forth a hand and touch that purple-bronze mountain opposite. And again the neighboring heights sought a sophistry of distance, and were blue and vague, and shimmered elusive through a fluctuating haze. The water in the chasm had too its variant guise; at times it was a burnished yellow with the emblazonment of the sun, or beneath a dull sky it glittered with a steely lustre, like some keen blade that, finely tempered, can be bent and writhen into an unwonted sinuosity; under a lunar spell it trembled and shoaled with violet tints, and glancing pearly shafts, and anon a silver gleam. On dark nights the stars registered one by one in these lucent currents, sequestered by the forest and the rocks, and held in the deep, deep heart of the mountain.