aghast, it might seem, at the sight of a human being in these preëmptions of solitude, where it should meet only its own disembodied kindred. The mare shied from them with dilated eyes, and chafed at the bit, and plunged and fretted because of the momentary pause. Jepson marked, far as it was, the lights in the depression where Broomsedge lay,—like a skein of fireflies,—and he gazed down with a pained and throbbing heart, a troublous remorse and a contradictory sense of self-exculpation, a poignant sympathy with Marcella, and, nevertheless, a pulsing, sensitive resentment. “’Twar a accident,—nuthin’ but a accident,” he muttered to himself. And then he bit his lip, remembering her caustic jeer of utilizing this interpretation. Once more the howl of the wolf, strangely nearer than before. “How them critters kin travel!” he said. Then even his strong hand had much ado to hold the mare, snorting and plunging, and pushing now through the laurel, now amidst the gaunt and sterile cliffs on the toilsome homeward way, whether he would or no. The rocks echoed her hoof-beats; she seemed to the listening ear the first of a file of horse,—a phantom file, for here and there, where the road was open, and the dull light still showed its curves, it was visibly vacant, for all the measured pace that sounded between the crags. How lonely were these great rocks in the wilderness and the vast silences! With what precipitate avidity they caught at a sound, repeating it from one to another, as if it had some strange significance, some prophecy, perchance, that they should hoard against its fulfillment. Of all the forms of inanimate nature, they alone seemed to him sentient in some sort; and appealing from their isolation, they alone sought to communicate with creatures endowed with a motor life, through those mysteries of the elastic air, set vibrating with a word. “Marcelly!” he cried out, with some wild desire to hear the wilderness voice her name. The whole world seemed to respond with a subdued acclaim. “Marcelly!” the mellow tone rang from the heights above. “Marcelly!” the tender echoes of the valley replied. And now a crystalline fine vibration from the upper atmosphere, “Marcelly!” as if the magic word were spoken in the strange scenes of that lucent and glittering star. He recovered in a moment his normal stolidity. He would have hushed, if he could, the voices he had summoned. The mare quickened her pace anew. As he emerged from the densities of the wilderness into the high vantage-ground of Bowles’s clearing, the vast splendor of the thickly instarred, moonless sky was before him,—so far and foreign it was, so dark the earth lay beneath, so drear. And he hardly cared that the dull orange glow coming from the notch was the light of his hearth-stone, although the young mare whickered gleefully at the sight, and went up the long, steep hill at a prancing pace, and with sundry plunges that threatened to unseat her practiced rider.