The fire was burning blithely on the hearth, with great beds of ashes about it to attest the late hour and the waste throughout the day. The room intimated a presentiment of winter, although the batten shutters were unclosed and the door stood open. Bunches of herbs, that but lately waved in the summer’s wind, were already dried and dangling from the rafters. Seeds had been gathered, and fruit dried, and red peppers strung, and gourds cut; and the tokens of this industry, marking the passing of the season, the homely harvests of the primitive housewife, all had place in the variegated pendants and festoons that swung above their heads. There was no work afoot at this time of the night. Isabel sat idle on an inverted noggin, seeming but just aroused from slumber. Mrs. Strobe perched on her chair, with her feet on its rungs and her hands clasped in her lap, and fixed her shrewd small eyes on her visitor. It was never too late to smoke, and Eli Strobe was filling his pipe with a dried tobacco-leaf, which he crumbled for the purpose. Rathburn drew his chair aside, that he might still see Marcella, who had sunk down on a low bench by the chimney-corner; and as he responded to his host’s invitation to smoke he glanced at her, the glow of the coal with which he kindled his pipe red on his face and in his eyes as her father spoke. “Marcelly seemed ter sense ez ef suthin’ mought be goin’ for’ard at the forge,—some sort’n row, or suthin’,” he said. “Seemed ter listen ez skeered an’ white! An’ fower or five times she wanted ter walk down ter the e-end o’ the turn-row ter listen better.” He puffed his pipe in silence for a moment. “But I told her ez ’twarn’t wuth while ter be oneasy. This hyar kentry, stranger,” he continued impressively, “air the peaceablest c’munity on the face o’ the livin’ yearth. Never hev no c’motions hyar,—naw, sir; no fights nor”—He brought up short, recollecting his own reduced state and his bandaged head, which were hardly the kind of corroborative instances his statement needed. “’Thout,” he qualified, “’thout it air ’lection time, an’ sech ez that. Ye don’t hear o’ no ’sturbances in Brumsaidge, now, _do_ ye?” He turned to Rathburn his haggard face, full of the pride of his charge, and reiterated, “Now, _do_ ye?” Rathburn had tilted his chair back slightly on its hind legs; he slipped the tips of his fingers in his trousers pockets; his pipe was redly aglow, and the firelight flickered over his face with its long yellow mustache and his close-clipped hair, for he did not wear his hat in the house as Eli Strobe did. “You’ve been cooped up a good while, Mr. Strobe. Let me see,—how long has it been since I came over here and prescribed for you? Well, no matter; you didn’t know about that, when you were first ill. Broomsedge Cove has been having it pretty much its own way ever since then, with the constable laid up.”