It was nearing noonday; the scent of the clover was dry and warm; a bee went droning by; the shadows of a few scrubby fruit trees, by courtesy an orchard, had almost collapsed about the roots, far different from their long, slanting matutinal habit. Autumn was on the way, although its signs were scant. On the great slope behind the house a single sour-wood tree on a bold crag flaunted, a deep, rich crimson color; it contrasted sharply with its own white tassels, and with the gray of the rugged rock, with the green of the pines hard by, with the delicate, indefinable blue of that slow up-wreathing smoke. Smoke? Whence should it come? He lifted himself upon his elbow and stared, his eyes startled and intent, as if he scarcely believed their testimony. For this vague and vagrant tissue was curling up from the old stick-and-clay chimney of the deserted house. He did not move. He lay watching this illusion, as it were, this guise of former days, wondering that the little cabin, gray and aged and trembling on the verge of dissolution, should lend itself to this fraud of vision, spuriously advertising itself a habitation, when he recalled how gaunt and bare it was within; how dark were the corners, where the spiders wove their time-thickened webs; how dilapidated a rift was in the flooring, where a puncheon had rotted and fallen through. Ah, looking at the graves in the little forlorn burying-plot among the crags, high on the slope in a square inclosure of gray palings, and remembering those who had quitted the cabin and the humble home ways forever, to lie out there in the silence of the mountains,—with the rain, and the mist, and the wind, and the snow to come and to go unheeded, while they waited the sound of the promised trump, which even the dull ear of death shall heed,—he felt how well it behooved that hearth-stone to be dark, and silent, and solitary; how strange a freak it was that this vaporous attestation of warmth and glow should deceive his senses. The smoke bent before the wind; it wafted toward him. He rose suddenly, with a changed face. “Somebody air in thar,” he said, with mustering indignation; “they hev got a fire, an’ they air a-burnin’ of green wood.” The smell of the smoke from the green wood, with the pungent, aromatic suggestions of its sap, was still stronger as he stood by the door. He hesitated for a moment; then with a muttered “I hev got manners, ef ye ain’t,” the owner of the house knocked, rousing such a sound in the cavernous stillness that his heart gave a great throb as he heard. Precipitate feet seemed to hastily plod to the door, failing somehow when reaching it, and waiting in silence, while fainter footfalls followed and paused also. It was only when he knocked once more that he realized that this was but the echo of his summons on the frail battens. There seemed no one inside, but as he tried the hitch he discovered, to his infinite surprise, that the door was barred within.