Late that night old Tubal Sims lingered on his hearthstone, brooding over the embers of the failing fire. As he reviewed the incidents of the evening, he chuckled with a sort of half-suppressed glee. His capacities for enjoyment were not blunted by the event itself; the very reminiscence afforded him a keen and acute pleasure. In all his sixty years he had never known such a vigil as this. He could not sleep for the crowding images with which his brain teemed. Each detail as it was enacted returned to him now with a freshened delight. The objections urged by the audience on the score of necromancy gave him peculiar joy; for he and his wife were of a progressive tendency of mind, and had that sly sense of mental superiority which is one of the pleasantest secrets to share with one’s own consciousness. As he sat on a broken-backed chair, his shoulders bent forward and his hands hanging loosely over his knees, the hard palms rubbing themselves together from time to time, for the air was growing chilly, the light of the embers on his shock of grizzled hair, and wrinkled face with its long blunt nose and projecting chin, and small deep-set eyes twinkling under their overhanging brows, he now and again lifted his head to note any sudden stir about the house. So foreign to his habit was this long-lingering wakefulness that it told on his nerves in an added acuteness of all his senses. He marked the gnawing of a mouse in the roof-room, the sound of the rising wind far away, and the first stir of the elm-tree above the clapboards. A cock crew from his roost hard by, and then with a yawn Tubal Sims pulled off one of his shoes and sat with it in his hand, looking at it absently, and laughing at the thought of old Parson Greenought and his interference to discourage Satan. “I wisht I could hev knowed what the boy would hev done nex’, if so be he hed been lef’ alone.” He made up his mind that he would ask the juggler the next day, and if possible induce a private repetition of some of the wonders for the appreciation of which, evidently, the public sentiment of Etowah Cove was not yet ripe. For the juggler was his guest, having reached his house a few evenings previous in the midst of a storm; and asking for shelter for the night, the wayfarer had found a hearty welcome, and was profiting by it. Sims could hear even now the bed-cords creak as he tossed in uneasy slumber up in the roof-room, so still the house had grown. So still that when a deep groan and then an agonized gasping sigh came from the sleeper, the sounds were so incongruous with the trend of old Tubal Sims’s happy reflections that he experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling that was like a shock. The rain began to fall on the roof; it seemed to come in fine lines on a fluctuating gust, for it was as if borne away on the wings of the wind, and the eaves vaguely dripped. “But oh,” cried the sleeper, “the one who lives! what can I do!--for whose life! his life! his life!” and spoke no more.