He turned toward the end of the cabin where a ladder stood, which he mounted. At the square opening which served as door and window to the loft, he paused and looked in, and by the moon's indistinct light he saw the three boys of the family lying on a pallet. The dull hum of mosquitoes sounded. He turned back to the ladder, and on its top, with his back resting against the cabin, he sat and looked out into the night. In the light all was beautiful; even the piles of brush were softened until they looked like the gray and silver tendrils of giant vines piled by titanic fairies, and the trunks of trees were columns in some mysterious and endless cathedral canopied with silvered green. Across the wilds of the forest, which in the magic of night and the moon were so beautiful, the thoughts of the youth again traveled back to his childhood and its mysteries, and he seemed to see again a very small grave in a lonesome spot beside which his mother cried and declared with tears and choking voice that she could not go away and leave it forever. To the boy who looked on, this had seemed strange. Why should she weep because she could not take a grave from Kentucky to Indiana, the new home, and such a tiny little grave? It had been a mystery. Later he came to answer the mystery of it by calling it "mother love." He thought of that grave, far away in Kentucky, as he sat on the ladder. Then he thought of the grave of the mother who had wept beside the little grave--two graves. Some time he too would fill a grave somewhere--and so would the singer on the heights. What was life after all? Its end was the same for all--whether a tiny grave or one long enough even for him? The question seemed to mock itself and laugh. Then the voice of the singer rang clear again--a pilgrim rejoicing, shouting--such a glad pilgrim, and again he felt himself impelled to the heights from which it had come--felt himself a creature of some fresh-born force he could no more fathom than explain. A wild cat screamed down the creek. The three boys thumped the floor, seeking in their sleep to destroy the mosquitoes. The dogs scratched under the house. The man snored. Once the baby cried and the mother soothed it. These voices and sounds seemed a part of the secrets of the night and of the strange awakening that possessed him with the pleasure and pain of its mystery. There was a sound, however, that came with the first pink of the morning that seemed in some unknown way to hold the key to the mystery of his strangely aroused hunger--a hunger born whether for good or ill he knew not. With the first stirring of life at the new day, a song bird just at the edge of the clearing sent out its call, clear as the voice of the singer on the bluff and, in the imagination of the inquiring youth, like it, glad and unafraid. But the bird was calling for a mate--one of its own kind--one which would answer its call. Again the call rang out penetrating and joyful.