It was Saturday night. The labors of the week were over. The time had come for them to return to the farm house. They turned away reluctantly, leaving nature to finish the work they had begun. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE SUPREME TEST "Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat." --Longfellow. The emotions of the woodsman's heart had been in the main cheerful and full of hope during the springtime and the summer; but when the autumn came, with its wailing winds, its dying vegetation, and falling leaves, new moods were superinduced in his sensitive soul. It is impossible even for the good and innocent to behold this universal dissolution and decay without remembering that they themselves must pass through some such temporary experience. But upon those who carry guilty secrets in their hearts these impressions descend with crushing weight. David felt them to the full when at last the winter set in; when the days were shortened and he was compelled to forego his toil at an early hour and retire to his cabin! There he was confronted by all the problems and temptations of a soul battling with the animal nature and striving to emancipate the spirit from its thraldom. At the close of one cold, blustering day, when his evening meal had been eaten in solitude, he sat down before the great fire which roared in the chimney. He read awhile, but grew tired of his book and threw it down. The melancholy which he had suppressed so long rose at last, and there burst on him the apparent uselessness of the task he had gratuitously assigned himself. Why had he ever done it? Why should he be sitting there alone in his cabin when by his side there might be that radiant woman whose presence would dispel instantly and forever the loneliness which ceaselessly gnawed at his heart? What, after all, was to be gained by this self-sacrifice? Life is very short, and there are few pleasures to be had, at best. Why should he not seize them as fast as they came within his reach? Had he not suffered enough already? Who had ever suffered more? It was only an unnecessary cruelty that had even suggested such agony as he was now experiencing. He was being cheated out of legitimate pleasures, and that by the advice of an old ascetic whose own capacity for enjoyment had been dried up, and who was envious of the happiness of others! As these thoughts rushed through his soul, he could not but perceive that he had been forced once more to enter the arena and to fight over the old battle which he had lost in the lumberman's cabin three years before! And he found to his dismay how much harder it was to fight these foes of virtue when they come to us not as vague imaginations of experiences which we have never tried, but as vivid memories of real events. Then he had only dreamed of the sweet fruits of the knowledge of good and evil: but now the taste was in his