the idea was quickly rejected. Besides, the opportunity for an
apotheosis of self-sacrifice was past. Nothing remained now but to
refuse the proffered bribe of claim and cabin by letter, for he must
not wait their return. He tore a leaf from a blotted diary, begun and
abandoned long since, and essayed to write. Scrawl after scrawl was
torn up, until his fury had cooled down to a frigid third personality.
"Mr. John Ford regrets to inform his late partners that their tender of
house, of furniture," however, seemed too inconsistent with the
pork-barrel table he was writing on; a more eloquent renunciation of
their offer became frivolous and idiotic from a caricature of Union
Mills, label and all, that appeared suddenly on the other side of the
leaf; and when he at last indited a satisfactory and impassioned
exposition of his feelings, the legible _addendum_ of "Oh, ain't you
glad you're out of the wilderness!"--the forgotten first line of a
popular song, which no scratching would erase--seemed too like an
ironical postscript to be thought of for a moment. He threw aside his
pen and cast the discordant record of past foolish pastime into the
dead ashes of the hearth.

How quiet it was! With the cessation of the rain the wind too had gone
down, and scarcely a breath of air came through the open door. He
walked to the threshold and gazed on the hushed prospect. In this
listless attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant reverberation,
a mere phantom of sound--perhaps the explosion of a distant blast in
the hills--that left the silence more marked and oppressive. As he
turned again into the cabin a change seemed to have come over it. It
already looked old and decayed. The loneliness of years of desertion
seemed to have taken possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in
the beams and rafters. To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets
and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks
there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to
a withered and mummied corpse. So it might look in after-years when
some passing stranger--but he stopped. A dread of the place was
beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the
monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the
long, long days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude;
summer days when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing around
that empty shell and voice its