e asked me in a boyish voice
if he might go up-stairs to see his uniform. In his dreams he was
leaving school to enter the royal navy.

Billy was away on an errand to the Falls, and it was Nurse Panton's
watch below, when at ten in the evening I saw the change come very
suddenly. The face of my dear friend, no longer old, but timeless,
reflected an unearthly majesty.

For the next hour I was busy rendering the last services, in haste, for
the lamp had a most peculiar smell. I took it away and lighted candles,
but it was not the lamp. Spreading the Union Jack upon the bed, I bolted
from that room. For a time I sat in the dining-hall but could not stay
there. Even in the barroom I still had to fight off something
intangible, a sense of being watched, a presentiment of evil coming
swiftly nearer.

Closing the door which led into the house, I opened that which gave upon
the yard, then placed a flickering candle on the counter, and my chair
in front of it facing the darkness. All through the evening the
drenching rain had fallen, with sob of dripping eaves. Now at the open
doorway, loud, insistent, the great diapason of the rain was choral to
those little sad voices which fluted, throbbed, and muttered near at
hand, the lament of the water drops, the liquid note from every pool,
the plaint of trickling streamlets.

It is the presence of the dead which makes their resting-places serene
with quiet beauty, instinct with tenderness toward all living hearts.
That presence had entered the good log house, a home of human warmth, of
kindly comfort, made holy, consecrate, where people would hush their
voices, constrained to reverence.

And in the gracious monotone of the rain, compound of voices joined in
requiem, I felt a soothing melancholy beauty, knowing well how peace not
of this world had come into the homestead.

But outside that, beyond, in the dread forest, a threat, a menace
filled the outer darkness. Fear clutched at my heart, a presentiment
told me of evil, of instant danger. Then, as though the horror in the
night moved other hearts as well as mine, the Chinese cook came groping
his way through the dining-hall and humbly scratched at the door. I let
him in and he crept to a stool in the near corner. I whispered to him:

"Are you frightened, Sam?"

"Too plenty much," he quavered, "me flitened bad."

He lighted his pipe and seemed, like me, to be eased by human company.
Once only he moved, and in the queerest wa