firelight that illuminated the open space before the
lime-kiln. Bartram set the door ajar again, flooding the spot with
light, that the whole company might get a fair view of Ethan Brand, and
he of them.

There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous man, now
almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to encounter at the
hotel of every thriving village throughout the country. It was the
stage-agent. The present specimen of the genus was a wilted and
smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly cut, brown,
bobtailed coat, with brass buttons, who, for a length of time unknown,
had kept his desk and corner in the bar-room, and was still puffing
what seemed to be the same cigar that he had lighted twenty years
before. He had great fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps, less on
account of any intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of
brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and
expressions, as well as his person. Another well-remembered, though
strangely altered, face was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still
called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled
shirtsleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an
attorney, in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and
in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and
toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night,
had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and degrees
of bodily labor, till at last, to adopt his own phrase, he slid into a
soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a soap-boiler, in a small way.
He had come to be but the fragment of a human being, a part of one foot
having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the
devilish grip of a steam-engine. Yet, though the corporeal hand was
gone, a spiritual member remained; for, stretching forth the stump,
Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers
with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated. A
maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless, whom the
world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either in this
or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had still kept up
the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in charity, and with his
one hand--and that the left one--fought a stern battle against want and
hostile circumstances.

Among the throng, too, came another personage,