ee her lying prematurely dead before him with her little child upon
her breast, the higher and the stronger rose his wrath against his
enemy. He looked about him for a weapon.

There was a gun hanging on the wall. He took it down, and moved a pace
or two towards the door of the perfidious Stranger's room. He knew the
gun was loaded. Some shadowy idea that it was just to shoot this man
like a wild beast seized him, and dilated in his mind until it grew into
a monstrous demon in complete possession of him, casting out all milder
thoughts, and setting up its undivided empire.

That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder thoughts, but artfully
transforming them. Changing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning
water into blood, love into hate, gentleness into blind ferocity. Her
image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading to his tenderness and
mercy with resistless power, never left his mind; but, staying there, it
urged him to the door; raised the weapon to his shoulder; fitted and
nerved his fingers to the trigger; and cried "Kill him! In his bed!"

He reversed the gun to beat the stock upon the door; he already held it
lifted in the air; some indistinct design was in his thoughts of calling
out to him to fly, for God's sake, by the window----

When suddenly, the struggling fire illuminated the whole chimney with a
glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to Chirp!

No sound he could have heard, no human voice, not even hers, could so
have moved and softened him. The artless words in which she had told him
of her love for this same Cricket were once more freshly spoken; her
trembling, earnest manner at the moment was again before him; her
pleasant voice--oh, what a voice it was for making household music at
the fireside of an honest man!--thrilled through and through his better
nature, and awoke it into life and action.

He recoiled from the door, like a man walking in his sleep, awakened
from a frightful dream; and put the gun aside. Clasping his hands before
his face, he then sat down again beside the fire, and found relief in
tears.

The Cricket on the Hearth came out into the room, and stood in Fairy
shape before him.

"'I love it,'" said the Fairy Voice, repeating what he well remembered,
"'for the many times I have heard it, and the many thoughts its harmless
music has given me.'"

"She said so!" cried the Carrier. "True!"

"'This has been a happy home, John! and I love the Cricket fo