The third and last of the miraculous events in the life of this
high-destined man was to be the attainment of extensive influence and
sway over his fellow-creatures. Whether he were to be a king and
founder of a hereditary throne, or the victorious leader of a people
contending for their freedom, or the apostle of a purified and
regenerated faith, was left for futurity to show. As messengers of the
sign by which Ralph Cranfield might recognize the summons, three
venerable men were to claim audience of him. The chief among them--a
dignified and majestic person arrayed, it may be supposed, in the
flowing garments of an ancient sage--would be the bearer of a wand or
prophet's rod. With this wand or rod or staff the venerable sage would
trace a certain figure in the air, and then proceed to make known his
Heaven-instructed message, which, if obeyed, must lead to glorious
results.

With this proud fate before him, in the flush of his imaginative youth
Ralph Cranfield had set forth to seek the maid, the treasure, and the
venerable sage with his gift of extended empire. And had he found
them? Alas! it was not with the aspect of a triumphant man who had
achieved a nobler destiny than all his fellows, but rather with the
gloom of one struggling against peculiar and continual adversity, that
he now passed homeward to his mother's cottage. He had come back, but
only for a time, to lay aside the pilgrim's staff, trusting that his
weary manhood would regain somewhat of the elasticity of youth in the
spot where his threefold fate had been foreshown him. There had been
few changes in the village, for it was not one of those thriving
places where a year's prosperity makes more than the havoc of a
century's decay, but, like a gray hair in a young man's head, an
antiquated little town full of old maids and aged elms and moss-grown
dwellings. Few seemed to be the changes here. The drooping elms,
indeed, had a more majestic spread, the weather-blackened houses were
adorned with a denser thatch of verdant moss, and doubtless there were
a few more gravestones in the burial-ground inscribed with names that
had once been familiar in the village street; yet, summing up all the
mischief that ten years had wrought, it seemed scarcely more than if
Ralph Cranfield had gone forth that very morning and dreamed a
day-dream till the twilight, and then turned back again. But his heart
grew cold because the village did not remember him as he remembere