ossed the brow.
When later on the two Fulchers and Witherspoon, moved by their own
imaginations, came up the hill and stared after him, the flight had
swallowed him up altogether.

The three men stood close. There was not a sound out of the wooded
blackness that hid the Farm from their eyes.

"It's all right," said young Fulcher, ending a silence.

"Don't see any lights," said Witherspoon.

"You wouldn't from here."

"It's misty," said the elder Fulcher.

They meditated for a space.

"'E'd 'ave come back if anything was wrong," said young Fulcher, and
this seemed so obvious and conclusive that presently old Fulcher said,
"Well," and the three went home to bed--thoughtfully I will admit....

A shepherd out by Huckster's Farm heard a squealing in the night that he
thought was foxes, and in the morning one of his lambs had been killed,
dragged halfway towards Hickleybrow and partially devoured....

The inexplicable part of it all is the absence of any indisputable
remains of Skinner!

Many weeks after, amidst the charred ruins of the Experimental Farm,
there was found something which may or may not have been a human
shoulder-blade and in another part of the ruins a long bone greatly
gnawed and equally doubtful. Near the stile going up towards Eyebright
there was found a glass eye, and many people discovered thereupon that
Skinner owed much of his personal charm to such a possession. It stared
out upon the world with that same inevitable effect of detachment, that
same severe melancholy that had been the redemption of his else worldly
countenance.

And about the ruins industrious research discovered the metal rings and
charred coverings of two linen buttons, three shanked buttons entire,
and one of that metallic sort which is used in the less conspicuous
sutures of the human Oeconomy. These remains have been accepted by
persons in authority as conclusive of a destroyed and scattered Skinner,
but for my own entire conviction, and in view of his distinctive
idiosyncrasy, I must confess I should prefer fewer buttons and more
bones.

The glass eye of course has an air of extreme conviction, but if it
really _is_ Skinner's--and even Mrs. Skinner did not certainly know if
that immobile eye of his was glass--something has changed it from a
liquid brown to a serene and confident blue. That shoulder-blade is an
extremely doubtful document, and I would like to put it side by side
with the gnawed scapulae of a few of t