“A body would ’low fur sartain ez thar war folks inside,” he said in doubt. His eyes, with a certain freedom characteristic of the proprietary glance, turned with a canvassing attention now to the walls and chimney, and again to the closed batten shutter. The hollyhocks that his mother had planted—how they had grown!—rapped against it with peremptory iteration, as if insistently summoning her forth to see how they throve and rewarded her early care. “Jes’ ez ye say!” he remarked loudly, for the benefit of the supposed occupants. “Ef ye don’t let me in, I’ll let myself in.” Still there was no response save the striking back of the tones of his voice from the walls, seeming intrusive and strident in the utter silence. He began to feel as if he were dreaming. He looked over his shoulder to see the scattered kine in the clover; his clay-bank mare standing unsaddled by the old rail fence, her bronze flanks glistening in the sun, her black mane tossing as she thrust her head over the high topmost rail, gazing with full, lustrous eyes down the slope, and snuffing with satisfaction the fresh breeze. He was awake,—very wide awake indeed, one might have thought, to see him take his pistol from the holster of the saddle on the ground and slip it into the long leg of his boot; for his faith in the efficacy of a “shootin’-iron” was hardly less pronounced than his faith in the efficacy of prayer. He walked in with a gingerly step amongst the tall, slim rods of the hollyhocks. “I hev ter be powerful partic’lar ’bout tromplin’ these hyar high weeds ez mam sets sech store by,” he said, repeating an old formula, familiar to him of yore, and distinguishing in the words, only after they were spoken, the sarcasm of the present and the past. Even in that urgent moment of action and of caution he sought to reflect that for her flowered the unfading splendors of the gardens of heaven, and he had a sudden close realization of the solace she must have found in that bloomful Paradise. A vague vision of vast multiplied fields of the Chilhowee lily was before his eyes: of these white ethereal glories were the heavenly borders, he knew. He paused as he stood; the white hollyhocks, with their garnet centres, touched his cheek. He laid his hand on the shutter, breast-high from the ground. One sudden violent wrench, and it swung open. The next instant, with the supple agility of a mountain panther, he sprang through the narrow aperture, and landed on his feet in the middle of the square, low-ceiled room. Empty,—quite empty. He stood amidst the clustering shadows, and gazed about with a dilated, excited eye. A square of yellow sunlight lay on the floor beneath the window, and in the slanting rays the motes were dancing. A new puncheon had replaced the rift in the floor; in the chimney-place were heaps of ashes, and amidst them red coals smouldered. The fire had been providently covered to last, but the