He seized it and endeavored to lift it, but in vain. Panting with exertion, he again and again exerted the fullest power of his active sinews, but the tree remained immovable—the opening remained sealed as firmly as with Solomon’s signet. Raising his candle towards it, Aristides saw the reason of its resistance. In his hurried ingress he had allowed the tree to revolve sufficiently to permit one of its roots to project into the opening, which held it firmly down. In the shock of the discovery the excitement which had sustained him gave way, and with a hopeless cry the just Aristides fell senseless on the floor of the gallery. CHAPTER VI THE TRIALS OF MRS. MORPHER “Now, where on earth can that child be?” said Mrs. Morpher, shading her eyes with her hand, as she stood at the door of the “Mountain Ranch,” looking down the Wingdam road at sunset. “With his best things on; too. Goodness!—what _were_ boys made for?” Mr. Morpher, without replying to this question, apparently addressed to himself as an adult representative of the wayward species, appeared at the door, and endeavored to pour oil on the troubled waters. “Oh, _he’s_ all right, Sue! Don’t fuss about _him_,” said Mr. Morpher with an imbecile sense of conveying comfort in the emphasized pronoun. “He’s down the gulch, or in the tunnel, or over to the claim. He’ll turn up by bedtime. Don’t you worry about _him._ I’ll look him up in a minit,” and Mr. Morpher, taking his hat, sauntered down the road in the direction of the National Hotel. Mrs. Morpher gazed doubtfully after her liege. “Looking up” Aristides, in her domestic experience, implied a prolonged absence in the bar-room of the hotel, the tedium whereof was beguiled by seven-up or euchre. But she only said: “Don’t be long, James,” and sighed hopelessly as she turned back into the house. Once again within her own castle walls Mrs. Morpher dropped her look of patient suffering and glanced defiantly around for a fresh grievance. The decorous little parlor offered nothing to provoke the hostility of her peculiar instincts. Spotless were the white curtains; the bright carpet guiltless of stain or dust. The chairs were placed arithmetically in twos, and added up evenly on the four sides with nothing to carry over. Two bunches of lavender and fennel breathed an odor of sanctified cleanliness through the room. Five daguerreotypes on the mantelpiece represented the Morpher family in the progressive stages of petrifaction, and had the Medusa-like effect of freezing visitors into similar attitudes in their chairs. The walls were further enlivened with two colored engravings of scenes in the domestic history of George Washington, in which the Father of his Country seemed to look blandly from his own correct family circle into Morpher’s, and to breathe quite audibly from his gilt frame a dignified blessing.