with many doubts as to the grace of his position, and
with an apology to the executioner if he should have happened to
transgress any of the rules of mortuary good-breeding,--on the ground
that "he never had had his head cut off before;" and Colonel Egbert
Crawford, never having been married before, may be excused if he had
some sort of indefinite impression that all the rooms in the house were
full of awful preparations, liable to be run against at any moment, and
altogether fatal to matrimonial prospects if accidentally disturbed. So
the piazza and the old man furnished him with a means of killing time
that was "devilish dull," and at the same time with a certainty of being
kept in a place where he could not possibly "run foul of anything" or do
any harm.

The old man had scarcely spoken for half an hour. He had been lulled by
the drowsy sounds of the summer noon, and by the growing listlessness of
his own nature, into a few moments of doze, in which the Colonel,
closing his eyes to the pages of his book, seemed on the point of
joining him. Suddenly a rooster, that had strolled around from the
barnyard and flown up to a cool location on the top of the garden fence,
and under the shade of one of the cherry-trees (at which elevation no
doubt his numerous harem in the yard regarded him with the same reverent
respect paid to the Prophet Brigham, when at a distance, by his
fifty-six wives and a fraction)--suddenly this rooster, forgetting the
proprieties of the place and the hour, lazily flapped his big wings and
emitted a crow of such magnificent dimensions as might have startled the
whole neighborhood. Colonel Egbert Crawford started and opened his eyes:
the old man straightened up his shaking head and did likewise. The sound
was like an icy sword-blade thrust into a slumbering and tepid
fountain--startling all the water spirits from repose and propriety,--or
like Christmas suddenly obtruded, keen and pure, into the sluggish rest
of midsummer. Of what the old man mused as his waking thoughts
recognized the sound, can never be known--possibly of the wealth which
he had garnered and of the broad lands over which that sound went
ringing--all his own, but his own in what miserable mockery! Of what
Colonel Egbert Crawford thought when the sound smote his ears, is much
more certain. The cock-crow and _betrayal_! He had been brought up in
the country, and many a time, in his younger and better days, when
intercourse with the wo