, spongy bed of moss, which was all
threaded through and through with the green vines and pale pink blossoms
of the mayflower, and she felt its fragrant breath streaming up in the
moist moonlight. As she leaned forward to look through a rocky crevice,
her arms rested on a bed of that brittle white moss she had often
gathered with so much admiration, and a scarlet rock-columbine, such as
she loved to paint, brushed her cheek,--and all these mute fair things
seemed to strive to keep her company in her chill suspense of
watchfulness. Two whippoorwills, from a clump of silvery birches, kept
calling to each other in melancholy iteration, while she stayed there
still listening, and knowing by an occasional sound of laughing, or the
explosion of some oath, that the men were not yet gone. At last they all
appeared again, and came to a cleared place among the dry leaves, quite
near to the rock where she was concealed, and kindled a fire which they
kept snapping and crackling by a constant supply of green resinous
hemlock branches.

The red flame danced and leaped through the green fuel, and leaping
upward in tongues of flame, cast ruddy bronze reflections on the old
pine-trees with their long branches waving with boards of white
moss,--and by the firelight Mara could see two men in sailor's dress
with pistols in their belts, and the man Atkinson, whom she had
recollected as having seen once or twice at her grandfather's. She
remembered how she had always shrunk from him with a strange instinctive
dislike, half fear, half disgust, when he had addressed her with that
kind of free admiration which men of his class often feel themselves at
liberty to express to a pretty girl of her early age. He was a man that
might have been handsome, had it not been for a certain strange
expression of covert wickedness. It was as if some vile evil spirit,
walking, as the Scriptures say, through dry places, had lighted on a
comely man's body, in which he had set up housekeeping, making it look
like a fair house abused by an unclean owner.

As Mara watched his demeanor with Moses, she could think only of a
loathsome black snake that she had once seen in those solitary
rocks;--she felt as if his handsome but evil eye were charming him with
an evil charm to his destruction.

"Well, Mo, my boy," she heard him say,--slapping Moses on the
shoulder,--"this is something like. We'll have a 'tempus,' as the
college fellows say,--put down the clams to roas