ben instinctively
raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp
glance on every side; but, convinced by a partial observation that no
animal was near, he would again give himself up to his thoughts. He was
musing on the strange influence that had led him away from his
premeditated course, and so far into the depths of the wilderness.
Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives
lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him
onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat. He
trusted that it was Heaven's intent to afford him an opportunity of
expiating his sin; he hoped that he might find the bones so long
unburied; and that, having laid the earth over them, peace would throw
its sunlight into the sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he
was aroused by a rustling in the forest at some distance from the spot
to which he had wandered. Perceiving the motion of some object behind a
thick veil of undergrowth, he fired, with the instinct of a hunter and
the aim of a practised marksman. A low moan, which told his success,
and by which even animals cars express their dying agony, was unheeded
by Reuben Bourne. What were the recollections now breaking upon him?

The thicket into which Reuben had fired was near the summit of a swell
of land, and was clustered around the base of a rock, which, in the
shape and smoothness of one of its surfaces, was not unlike a gigantic
gravestone. As if reflected in a mirror, its likeness was in Reuben's
memory. He even recognized the veins which seemed to form an
inscription in forgotten characters: everything remained the same,
except that a thick covert of bushes shrouded the lowerpart of the
rock, and would have hidden Roger Malvin had he still been sitting
there. Yet in the next moment Reuben's eye was caught by another change
that time had effected since he last stood where he was now standing
again behind the earthy roots of the uptorn tree. The sapling to which
he had bound the bloodstained symbol of his vow had increased and
strengthened into an oak, far indeed from its maturity, but with no
mean spread of shadowy branches. There was one singularity observable
in this tree which made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches
were in luxuriant life, and an excess of vegetation had fringed the
trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently stricken the
upper part of the oak, and the very topmo