The dead leaves, sodden with the winter rains, closed in masses about the feet of Pokeberry, and of the young Englishman as he tramped untiringly at her muzzle. The shaft of a young pine rose slender and virginal from the lace-work of bare trees, its plumy crest breaking with lucent emerald the sea-blue reach of sky. A cardinal-bird flashed, with unconscious contrast, against the neutral tints of the woody distance, meshed as it were in the multitudinous glittering of sunlit twigs. From the leaf-stirred silence, far in the heart of the forest, came the urgent rat-a-plan of a woodpecker. Dead leaves occasionally, loosened by the fitful wind, fell, turning slowly in their descent, now between the startled ears of Pokeberry, themselves most leaf-like, now upon Virginia’s skirt or hat, as she sat wordless, listlessly supporting the reins upon her knee. They came presently to a narrow mountain stream, clear and brown, over the sunken leaves. The sunlight through the swaying tendrils of a wild grape-vine overhead sent dim but sharply defined shadows wavering back and forth over its bright surface, as though, being spiritualized, they breathed with a new life. A corn-crake, moving cautiously among the withered water-grasses, thrust forward its gay crest and peered inquisitively at them, whereupon the collie cleared the brook with an arching bound, and set forth in mad pursuit of this new quarry. The crake at once rose into the blue lift, with the harsh, derisive cry from which it takes its name. After a while they came upon a log-cabin set in a little patch of cleared ground. From a small window close against the roof flaunted a mud-stained curtain of sacking. The red clay marks responded to a certain morbidness in Virginia, by suggesting the wiping of bloody hands upon the coarse stuff. There had been a murder some years before on this very mountain, and thoughts of a grewsome sort were easily called forth in her when remembering. A few black-and-white pigs of the genus “nigger” hurtled squealing down the hill-side, pursued by the indefatigable collie, while a little fawn-colored child, with whity-brown hair and purplish-white eyes, stood in the door and apparently bit its thumb at them. “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” quoted Roden, cheerily, whereat the little darky fled, with a shrill “Yah!” of mingled delight and terror, into the bacon-perfumed room beyond. They were now stopped by some draw-bars, which passed, they found themselves ascending a steep incline sown with large stones, as though Jove and his giants might have had a sharp encounter just in that spot. But having gained the top of the bluff, they came upon a view at which Roden stood and stared in silent admiration. It seemed to him that he had never before so entirely realized the ball-like character of the earth. It seemed now to be swinging like a magician’s globe, imprisoned in another of larger size, which was hollowed from some marvellous, million-colored gem.