legions of the rain down and down the valley; the wind wailed afar off, under sentence of exile. An utter darkness overspread all the world. She might not have kept the road, save for that strange yet familiar phenomenon of the independence of the muscles, by which one mechanically performs actions, the processes of which have no recognized correlative consciousness in the brain. Her feet found the way which her intelligence could not discern. She presently felt the wet blades of the cornstalks in her face, and knew that she was in the turn-row, walking as one blind or asleep along the straight, narrow space, and turning when the gate was reached. Again she paused to listen if any footfall followed: only the turmoils of the rain sobbing in the half-spent passion of the storm, and the melancholy stirring of the forests, until suddenly an alien sound smote her ear, a high, cracked, exhausted voice, now talking incoherently, now seeking to scream with muscles that failed midway, all betokening the continued delirium within the cabin. The proximity of the dwelling was further suggested by the feeble flicker through the crevices of the batten shutter. Once more she reflected how powerless they within were to succor or subdue this strange, distraught spirit that seemed to have invaded their home; how far away that entity whom they knew as Eli Strobe had journeyed, unconscious of their efforts, unresponsive to their appeals. When she reached the porch she lingered, peering into the darkness; the rain had almost ceased near at hand; farther away she could hear the pattering of the long files of drops into the valley below, but it had a fitful, discursive effect, and betokened that this verge of the rain-cloud had followed into the vasty vagueness wherein the great vaporous masses were expended. The vines close at hand were all dripping, dripping; more than once the iteration of the drops beguiled into hopeful credulity her anxious desire to hear a step close at hand. Although a comparative silence, or rather a sense of spent sound, made the air null, there was some vague stir in the upper atmosphere; for once or twice the rifts rent in the black, overhanging clouds showed the palpitating splendors of a white star. A raucous sound made her start,—only a frog croaking in a pool by the fence. And once more that wild, strange voice within rang out, with all its suggested lapses of identity to make her shrink and wince. She burst into tears, and turned again toward the gate. She would not go in and tell the frantic grandmother and sister how her mission had failed, how she had been mocked and derided with fantastic misrepresentations and promises. A physician, was he, forsooth, a “mighty smart man,” who would haunt the little mountain forge in company with Jake Baintree, in the secret midnight, for some inexplicable purpose, and wield the hammer at the anvil! She knew little of the habitudes of this