as. You are but a crazy fellow,--I told you so twenty years
ago,-neither better nor worse than a crazy fellow, and the fit
companion of old Humphrey, here!"

He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white hair, thin
visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this aged person had
been wandering about among the hills, inquiring of all travellers whom
he met for his daughter. The girl, it seemed, had gone off with a
company of circus-performers, and occasionally tidings of her came to
the village, and fine stories were told of her glittering appearance as
she rode on horseback in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on the
tight-rope.

The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed
unsteadily into his face.

"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his
hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes
a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she
send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?"

Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from
whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our
tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan
Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted,
absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.

"Yes," he murmured, turning away from the hoary wanderer, "it is no
delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin!"

While these things were passing, a merry scene was going forward in the
area of cheerful light, beside the spring and before the door of the
hut. A number of the youth of the village, young men and girls, had
hurried up the hill-side, impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand, the
hero of so many a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding nothing,
however, very remarkable in his aspect,--nothing but a sunburnt
wayfarer, in plain garb and dusty shoes, who sat looking into the fire
as if he fancied pictures among the coals,--these young people speedily
grew tired of observing him. As it happened, there was other amusement
at hand. An old German Jew travelling with a diorama on his back, was
passing down the mountain-road towards the village just as the party
turned aside from it, and, in hopes of eking out the profits of the
day, the showman had kept them company to the lime-kiln.

"Come, old Dutchman," cried one of the young men, "let us see your
pictures, if