uple of darkey
lovers whispered on doorsteps. No birds, nor even crickets, serenaded
the torpid night. The shuffling feet of Andrew Waples barely made
watch-dogs growl in their dreams, and started his own heart with the
concussions they produced on the arborescent and deeply-shadowed
aisles of the after midnight. He saw the town-hall clock pallidly
illuminated above its tower. The low frame villa of Chancellor
Walworth, cowering amongst the pine-trees, expressed the burden of
parricidal blood that had of late oppressed its memories. There were
no murmurs from the court-room where Judge Barnard had been tried,
but its deep silence seemed from the clock to tick: "Removed!
disqualified!" and "Disqualified! removed!"

Turning from Broadway to lesser streets of cheap hotels and plain
boarding cottages, where weary women and girls had drudged all day
long, and washerwomen moaned and fluting and ruffling were the
amusements of the poor, Andrew Waples became haunted with the idea
that Saratoga was poisoned, that every soul in the village was dead,
and that he was to be the last man of the century to drink of the
Springs. Nature and night were in the swoon of love or death. Parting
their drowsy curtains went Waples through the muffled echoes, impelled
by nothing greater than a human thirst.

He saw his shadow, at length, fall down the steep stairs of the valley
of High Rock Spring, as he stood at the top of the steps uncovered to
the moon. It was a shadow nearly a hundred feet long, a high-cheeked
head without a chin and all nose, like the profile of a mountain. But
what was extraordinary was the total absence of an abdominal part to
Mr. Waples' exaggerated shadow, for he distinctly saw a young
maple-tree, in perfect moonlight, grow through the cavity where his
stomach ought to have been.

"I must be hollow," said Andrew, as he looked,--"the frame of a
stomach removed; for surely my whole figure is in blackness, except my
bread-basket." But his fears were dissipated by the sound of voices,
of glasses clinking and water running, and the evident semblance of
life at the High Rock Spring in the ravine beneath, to which the steep
stairs descended. At the same moment he descried another shadow
propelled alongside his own, as if from some far distance in the rear
a human object was slowly advancing to stand beside him.

There were very old wooden houses around this precipice or promontory
of Saratoga, some of them a hundred years