Instantly the place was dark and silent. He drew himself up, bruised and shaken, and ran limping around to the door. It was closed. He pulled it open, and the pale moonlight fell through the broad aperture, revealing the empty and dusky place. A few coals glowed slumberously beneath the sooty hood. He could not at once remember whether he had left fire here. He doubted his senses. Had he seen aught, heard aught? Stay! the anvil, telltale, was still softly ringing, ringing,—fine and faint metallic tones. He could hardly have said why this obedience to natural laws should shake his superstition, but with the conviction that the intrusion was of human agency, he ran out into the night, and roused the echoes with his wild halloo. How they tossed the word to and fro! How they hailed the further steeps, and how the savage heights replied! And when he had listened until all had sunk to silence, a far and faint “Halloo!” from the vague upper air startled him with a chill tremor. He suddenly began to reflect that he had found both door and shutter closed, and this place, sounding and alight one moment, dark and silent and empty the next. As to the fire, he trembled to think where it might have been kindled. And the anvil,—would it not ring if that pallid simulacrum of a smith should smite it? With these thoughts he betook himself home, leaving the forge silent and dark behind him, although he often sought with a fearful fancy to think it alight once more, and to hear the ringing of the anvil or the melancholy sighing of the bellows. V. Marcella was spinning on the porch, when Teck Jepson and her father came through the cornfield toward the cabin,—spinning at the little flax-wheel, as she sat in a low chair, her foot on the treadle. The jack-bean vines that hung above her head blossomed lilac and white; the amethystine mountain looming behind the gray roof was gradually turning a darksome purple; the blue and curling smoke that issued from the stick-and-clay chimney made spiral progress up and up the slope. The zenith was a lustreless golden hue, and the west was crimson and burned with a passion of color, and the evening star was kindling. The daylight lingered, nevertheless, and as the girl drew out the long fine fibre of the flax, it glistened yellow, while the wheel whirled, and she seemed to be spinning sunbeams. Her face was serene, though unsmiling, and she sat silent, while the swift wheel whirred and whirred, and a katydid clamored in the gourd-vines hard by. Amidst their luxuriant tangles a firefly sent forth a fluctuating gleam.