to find the clew he had lost. They might have
impressed a more appreciative audience, but not one more entertained
than the cluster of men who looked and paused and leered in amusement
at one another, and thrust out satirical tongues. Long after they had
disappeared, the strains of the violin could be heard, filling the
solemn, stricken, strangely stunted woods with a grotesquely merry
presence, hilarious and jeering.

Purdee found it possible to survive the destruction of illusions. Most
of us do. It wrought in him, however, the saturnine changes natural upon
the relinquishment of a dear and dead fantasy. This ethereal entity is
a more essential component of happiness than one might imagine from the
extreme tenuity of the conditions of its existence. Purdee's fantasy may
have been a poor thing, but, although he could calmly enough close
its eyes, and straighten its limbs, and bury it decently from out the
offended view of fact, he felt that he should mourn it in his heart as
long as he should live. And he was bereaved.

There is a certain stage in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy.
Purdee, always taciturn, grave, uncommunicative, was, invested with an
austere aloofness, and was hardly to be approached as he sat, silent
and absent, brooding over the fire at his own home. When roused by some
circumstance of the domestic routine, and it became apparent that his
mood was not sullenness or anger, but simple and complete introversion,
it added a dignity and suggested a remoteness that were yet less
reassuring. His son, who stood in awe of him--not because of paternal
severity, but because no boy could refrain from a worshipping respect
for so miraculous a shot, a woodsman so subtly equipped with all elusive
sylvan instincts and knowledge--forbore to break upon his meditations
by the delivery of Grinnel's message. Nevertheless the consciousness of
withholding it weighed heavily upon him. He only pretermitted it for
a time, until a more receptive state of mind should warrant it. Day by
day, however, he looked with eagerness when he came into the cabin
in the evening to ascertain if his father were still seated in the
chimney-corner silently smoking his pipe. Purdee had seldom remained at
home so long at a time, and the boy had a daily fear that the gun on the
primitive rack of deer antlers would be missing, and word left in the
family that he had taken the trail up the mountain, and would return
"'cord-in' ter luck with t