ly sweet-potato, destined to slowly roast by
morning. A long and careful job she made of it, and unconcernedly kept
him waiting while she pottered back and forth about the hearth. She
looked up once with an authoritative eye, and he hastily helped to
adjust the potato with the end of the shovel. And then he glanced at
her, incongruously enough, as if waiting for her autocratic nod of
approval. She gravely accorded it, and pattered nimbly across the
puncheon floor to the bed.

"Now," he drawled, in gruff accents, "ef you-uns hev all had yer fill o'
foolin' with this hyar fire, I'll kiver it, like I hev started out ter
do."

At this moment there was a loud trampling upon the porch without. The
batten door shook violently. The ranger sprang up. As he frowned the
hair on his scalp, drawn forward, seemed to rise like bristles.

"Dad-burn that thar fresky filly!" he cried, angrily. "Jes' brung her
noisy bones up on that thar porch agin, an' her huffs will bust spang
through the planks o' the floor the fust thing ye know."

The narrow aperture, as he held the door ajar, showed outlined against
the darkness the graceful head of a young mare, and once more hoof-beats
resounded on the rotten planks of the porch.

Clouds were adrift in the sky. No star gleamed in the wide space high
above the sombre mountains. On every side they encompassed Lonesome
Cove, which seemed to have importunately thrust itself into the darkling
solemnities of their intimacy.

All at once the ranger let the door fly from his hand, and stood
gazing in blank amazement. For there was a strange motion in the void
vastnesses of the wilderness. They were creeping into view. How,
he could not say, but the summit of the great mountain opposite was
marvellously distinct against the sky. He saw the naked, gaunt, December
woods. He saw the grim, gray crags. And yet Lonesome Cove below and the
spurs on the other side were all benighted. A pale, flickering light
was dawning in the clouds; it brightened, faded, glowed again, and their
sad, gray folds assumed a vivid vermilion reflection, for there was a
fire in the forest below. Only these reactions of color on the clouds
betokened its presence and its progress. Sometimes a fluctuation of
orange crossed them, then a glancing line of blue, and once more that
living red hue which only a pulsating flame can bestow.

"Air it the comin' o' the Jedgmint Day, Tobe?" asked his wife, in a meek
whisper.

"I'd be afraid