There was a road from Barker’s to the home of the Shepherds’ which followed the river a distance, and then led up on to the divide where their house was built, and I was very familiar with it, having travelled it many times. It was the road which Jo had used on his visits to Mateel when he was an apprentice at Barker’s, and part of it the road which Clinton Bragg had travelled on his fatal journey the night he was married to Mateel, and if I saw one spectre in the darkness around me, I saw a thousand. The story I have written was produced in white lines etched on the darkness of the night--Jo returning from the minister’s house, young and hopeful; Jo going to his own home, with Mateel by his side, a little older, and looking careworn, but still hopeful; Jo coming toward Barker’s after the separation from Mateel, with a frown upon his face so fierce and distressed that I could not tell whether his enemy should pity or fear him; Jo skulking behind the trees, and watching up the road; Jo carrying Mateel in his arms, and clambering up the hill which led from the mill to his house; Jo in jail, with the white shroud about him, under which none of us was to look, and wherever I turned my eyes, upward or downward, to the right or to the left, ahead or behind, was his grave, which I had just left at Fairview. Clinton Bragg was lying under every tree, first as I had seen him dead in the woods, and then as he lay surrounded by the crowd in the town, and walking wearily in front of me was my father, bending low under a heavy burden which he carried. If I whipped up the horses, and hurried on, the spectre disappeared for a moment, but after I had slowed up again, and had almost forgotten it in feeling my way through the trees, it appeared ahead of me as before, only that the load he carried was heavier, and that he pursued his journey with more difficulty. This fancy took such hold upon my imagination that I thought of the distant light which finally appeared as the lamp which always burned in my mother’s room, toward which the bending figure was always travelling, and when it turned out to be a light in Mr. Shepherd’s window, I looked about for the man with the load on his back, but he had disappeared, with Jo, and Bragg, and the rest of them.