Bowles started, with a wild glance about the room, as if to identify the chair that had borne so ghastly a burden. “Laws-a-massy, naw, M’ria! _That_ cheer air in the roof-room. What ails ye ter ax sech?” “Waal,” she said hastily, in much perturbation, “the old folks ’low ez sech a cheer will groan an’ creak ever arter.” “’Tain’t disturbin’ me noways, cousin M’ria,” said cousin Eli. “I’ll die when my time comes.” He seemed to make an admission in saying this in a deep bass voice. “I dunno what ailed me ter take up sech a notion,” she observed, with a forced laugh, as she resumed her knitting. After this she succeeded in so steering the conversation as to exclude Jepson and further reminiscences of Jezreel; and she was not sorry when, after sitting for a time in brooding silence, he rose, put his pipe into his pocket, and strolled out upon the porch, then down the path in the light of the midsummer moon. Somehow it seemed to share the lush splendors of the August, the climax of ripening growths, of fair fruitions, of rank and riotous blossoming. Never before, he thought, had it worn so rich and radiant a guise as it hung above the purple mountains; a gilded bloom rested upon its disk; this fine and delicate efflorescence softened yet did not dim its lustre. Far, far, he followed it amidst the great trees, draped from their stupendous heights to the ground with the luxuriant cables of the grapevines, the fragrance of the fruit perfuming the air. The laurel was done with blooming, but the dew lurked in its bosky tangles, and sent out a scintillating glimmer. How few the stars were!—few and faint, for the night was the moon’s. He paused in a rocky rift in a great gorge, that he might look up to see one afar off, with a dim glitter; and the tracings of a coil that he knew, but not as Scorpio; and in a gap in a Carolina Mountain a planet that was rising. How long ago they were kindled,—these stars! How many eyes had turned to them! The prophets saw them. And as he tended sheep and lay on the hillsides with his flocks, David himself had known these lucent splendors. And Moses, familiar of the high mountains, in whose fastnesses he spoke with the Lord as man with man,—they surely shone upon that hidden place where the great lawgiver lay. “A powerful strange buryin’,” he meditated, “the Lord himself chief mourner.” He paused, pondering, with a sort of solemn pride that poor humanity should ever have been thus cherished.