glanced around the cabin. It
looked familiar and yet strange. Rather, it looked strange BECAUSE
still familiar, and therefore incongruous with the new atmosphere that
surrounded it--discordant with the echo of their last meeting, and
painfully accenting the change. There were the four "bunks," or sleeping
berths, of his companions, each still bearing some traces of the
individuality of its late occupant with a dumb loyalty that seemed to
make their light-hearted defection monstrous. In the dead ashes of the
Judge's pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in
the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower's bunk still were the
memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes
clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record of
the Right Bower's old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings
of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of
their old extravagant devotion--all a mute protest to the change.

He remembered how, a fatherless, truant schoolboy, he had drifted into
their adventurous, nomadic life, itself a life of grown-up truancy like
his own, and became one of that gypsy family. How they had taken the
place of relations and household in his boyish fancy, filling it with
the unsubstantial pageantry of a child's play at grown-up existence,
he knew only too well. But how, from being a pet and protege, he had
gradually and unconsciously asserted his own individuality and taken
upon his younger shoulders not only a poet's keen appreciation of that
life, but its actual responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he
never suspected. He had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their
ways, a novice in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had
encouraged it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an
excuse for a renunciation of HIM. The poetry that had for two years
invested the material and sometimes even mean details of their existence
was too much a part of himself to be lightly dispelled. The lesson of
those ingenuous moralists failed, as such lessons are apt to fail; their
discipline provoked but did not subdue; a rising indignation, stirred by
a sense of injury, mounted to his cheek and eyes. It was slow to come,
but was none the less violent that it had been preceded by the benumbing
shock of shame and pride.

I hope I shall not prejudice the reader's sympathies if my duty as a
simple chronicler compel