University of Virginia Library

Circumstance.

SHE had remained, during all that day, with a
sick neighbor, — those eastern wilds of Maine
in that epoch frequently making neighbors and
miles synonymous, — and so busy had she
been with care and sympathy that she did not at first
observe the approaching night. But finally the level
rays, reddening the snow, threw their gleam upon the
wall, and, hastily donning cloak and hood, she bade her
friends farewell and sallied forth on her return. Home
lay some three miles distant, across a copse, a meadow,
and a piece of woods, — the woods being a fringe on the
skirts of the great forests that stretch far away into the
North. That home was one of a dozen log-houses lying
a few furlongs apart from each other, with their half-cleared
demesnes separating them at the rear from a
wilderness untrodden save by stealthy native or deadly
panther tribes.

She was in a nowise exalted frame of spirit, — on the
contrary, rather depressed by the pain she had witnessed
and the fatigue she had endured; but in certain temperaments
such a condition throws open the mental pores, so
to speak, and renders one receptive of every influence.
Through the little copse she walked slowly, with her

cloak folded about her, lingering to imbibe the sense of
shelter, the sunset filtered in purple through the mist of
woven spray and twig, the companionship of growth not
sufficiently dense to band against her, the sweet home-feeling
of a young and tender wintry wood. It was
therefore just on the edge of the evening that she
emerged from the place and began to cross the meadowland.
At one hand lay the forest to which her path
wound; at the other the evening star hung over a tide of
failing orange that slowly slipped down the earth's broad
side to sadden other hemispheres with sweet regret.
Walking rapidly now, and with her eyes wide-open, she
distinctly saw in the air before her what was not there a
moment ago, a winding-sheet, — cold, white, and ghastly,
waved by the likeness of four wan hands, — that rose
with a long inflation, and fell in rigid folds, while a voice,
shaping itself from the hollowness above, spectral and
melancholy, sighed, — “The Lord have mercy on the
people! The Lord have mercy on the people!” Three
times the sheet with its corpse-covering outline waved
beneath the pale hands, and the voice, awful in its solemn
and mysterious depth, sighed, “The Lord have mercy on
the people!” Then all was gone, the place was clear
again, the gray sky was obstructed by no deathly blot;
she looked about her, shook her shoulders decidedly, and,
pulling on her hood, went forward once more.

She might have been a little frightened by such an apparition,
if she had led a life of less reality than frontier
settlers are apt to lead; but dealing with hard fact does
not engender a flimsy habit of mind, and this woman was
too sincere and earnest in her character, and too happy in
her situation, to be thrown by antagonism, merely, upon
superstitious fancies and chimeras of the second-sight.

She did not even believe herself subject to an hallucination,
but smiled simply, a little vexed that her thought
could have framed such a glamour from the day's occurrences,
and not sorry to lift the bough of the warder of
the woods and enter and disappear in their sombre path.
If she had been imaginative, she would have hesitated at
her first step into a region whose dangers were not visionary;
but I suppose that the thought of a little child at
home would conquer that propensity in the most habituated.
So, biting a bit of spicy birch, she went along.
Now and then she came to a gap where the trees had
been partially felled, and here she found that the lingering
twilight was explained by that peculiar and perhaps
electric film which sometimes sheathes the sky in diffused
light for many hours before a brilliant aurora. Suddenly,
a swift shadow, like the fabulous flying-dragon, writhed
through the air before her, and she felt herself instantly
seized and borne aloft. It was that wild beast — the
most savage and serpentine and subtle and fearless of our
latitudes — known by hunters as the Indian Devil, and
he held her in his clutches on the broad floor of a swinging
fir-bough. His long sharp claws were caught in her
clothing, he worried them sagaciously a little, then, finding
that ineffectual to free them, he commenced licking
her bare arm with his rasping tongue and pouring over
her the wide streams of his hot, fœtid breath. So quick
had this flashing action been that the woman had had no
time for alarm; moreover, she was not of the screaming
kind: but now, as she felt him endeavoring to disentangle
his claws, and the horrid sense of her fate smote her, and
she saw instinctively the fierce plunge of those weapons,
the long strips of living flesh torn from her bones, the
agony, the quivering disgust, itself a worse agony, —
while by her side, and holding her in his great lithe embrace,
the monster crouched, his white tusks whetting and
gnashing, his eyes glaring through all the darkness like
balls of red fire, — a shriek, that rang in every forest hollow,
that startled every winter-housed thing, that stirred
and woke the least needle of the tasselled pines, tore
through her lips. A moment afterward, the beast left the
arm, once white, now crimson, and looked up alertly.

She did not think at this instant to call upon God.
She called upon her husband. It seemed to her that she
had but one friend in the world; that was he; and again
the cry, loud, clear, prolonged, echoed through the woods.
It was not the shriek that disturbed the creature at his
relish; he was not born in the woods to be scared of an
owl, you know; what then? It must have been the
echo, most musical, most resonant, repeated and yet repeated,
dying with long sighs of sweet sound, vibrated
from rock to river and back again from depth to depth of
cave and cliff. Her thought flew after it; she knew, that,
even if her husband heard it, he yet could not reach her
in time; she saw that while the beast listened he would
not gnaw, — and this she felt directly, when the rough,
sharp, and multiplied stings of his tongue retouched her
arm. Again her lips opened by instinct, but the sound
that issued thence came by reason. She had heard that
music charmed wild beasts, — just this point between life
and death intensified every faculty, — and when she
opened her lips the third time, it was not for shrieking,
but for singing.

A little thread of melody stole out, a rill of tremulous
motion; it was the cradle-song with which she rocked her
baby; — how could she sing that? And then she remembered
the baby sleeping rosily on the long settee before

the fire, — the father cleaning his gun, with one foot on
the green wooden rundle, — the merry light from the
chimney dancing out and through the room, on the rafters
of the ceiling with their tassels of onions and herbs, on the
log walls painted with lichens and festooned with apples,
on the king's-arm slung across the shelf with the old
pirate's-cutlass, on the snow-pile of the bed, and on the
great brass clock, — dancing, too, and lingering on the
baby, with his fringed-gentian eyes, his chubby fists
clenched on the pillow, and his fine breezy hair fanning
with the motion of his father's foot. All this struck her
in one, and made a sob of her breath, and she ceased.

Immediately the long red tongue thrust forth again.
Before it touched, a song sprang to her lips, a wild sea-song,
such as some sailor might be singing far out on
trackless blue water that night, the shrouds whistling
with frost and the sheets glued in ice, — a song with the
wind in its burden and the spray in its chorus. The
monster raised his head and flared the fiery eyeballs upon
her, then fretted the imprisoned claws a moment and was
quiet; only the breath like the vapor from some hell-pit
still swathed her. Her voice, at first faint and fearful,
gradually lost its quaver, grew under her control and subject
to her modulation; it rose on long swells, it fell in
subtile cadences, now and then its tones pealed out like
bells from distant belfries on fresh sonorous mornings.
She sung the song through, and, wondering lest his name
of Indian Devil were not his true name, and if he would
not detect her, she repeated it. Once or twice now, indeed,
the beast stirred uneasily, turned, and made the
bough sway at his movement. As she ended, he snapped
his jaws together, and tore away the fettered member,
curling it under him with a snarl, — when she burst into

the gayest reel that ever answered a fiddle-bow. How
many a time she had heard her husband play it on the
homely fiddle made by himself from birch and cherry-wood!
how many a time she had seen it danced on the
floor of their one room, to the patter of wooden clogs and
the rustle of homespun petticoat! how many a time she
had danced it herself! — and did she not remember once,
as they joined clasps for eight-hands-round, how it had
lent its gay, bright measure to her life? And here she
was singing it alone, in the forest, at midnight, to a
wild beast! As she sent her voice trilling up and down
its quick oscillations between joy and pain, the creature
who grasped her uncurled his paw and scratched the bark
from the bough; she must vary the spell; and her voice
spun leaping along the projecting points of tune of a hornpipe.
Still singing, she felt herself twisted about with a
low growl and a lifting of the red lip from the glittering
teeth; she broke the hornpipe's thread, and commenced
unravelling a lighter, livelier thing, an Irish jig. Up and
down and round about her voice flew, the beast threw
back his head so that the diabolical face fronted hers, and
the torrent of his breath prepared her for his feast as the
anaconda slimes his prey. Franticly she darted from
tune to tune; his restless movements followed her. She
tired herself with dancing and vivid national airs, growing
feverish and singing spasmodically as she felt her horrid
tomb yawning wider. Touching in this manner all the
slogan and keen clan cries, the beast moved again, but
only to lay the disengaged paw across her with heavy
satisfaction. She did not dare to pause; through the
clear cold air, the frosty starlight, she sang. If there
were yet any tremor in the tone, it was not fear, — she
had learned the secret of sound at last; nor could it be
chill, — far too high a fever throbbed her pulses; it was
nothing but the thought of the log-house and of what
might be passing within it. She fancied the baby stirring
in his sleep and moving his pretty lips, — her husband
rising and opening the door, looking out after her, and
wondering at her absence. She fancied the light pouring
through the chink and then shut in again with all the
safety and comfort and joy, her husband taking down the
fiddle and playing lightly with his head inclined, playing
while she sang, while she sang for her life to an Indian
Devil. Then she knew he was fumbling for and finding
some shining fragment and scoring it down the yellowing
hair, and unconsciously her voice forsook the wild wartunes
and drifted into the half-gay, half-melancholy Rosin
the Bow.

Suddenly she woke pierced with a pang, and the daggered
tooth penetrating her flesh; — dreaming of safety,
she had ceased singing and lost it. The beast had regained
the use of all his limbs, and now, standing and
raising his back, bristling and foaming, with sounds that
would have been like hisses but for their deep and fearful
sonority, he withdrew step by step toward the trunk
of the tree, still with his flaming balls upon her. She
was all at once free, on one end of the bough, twenty feet
from the ground. She did not measure the distance, but
rose to drop herself down, careless of any death, so that it
were not this. Instantly, as if he scanned her thoughts,
the creature bounded forward with a yell and caught her
again in his dreadful hold. It might be that he was not
greatly famished; for, as she suddenly flung up her voice
again, he settled himself composedly on the bough, still
clasping her with invincible pressure to his rough, ravenous
breast, and listening in a fascination to the sad,

strange U-la-lu that now moaned forth in loud, hollow
tones above him. He half closed his eyes, and sleepily
reopened and shut them again.

What rending pains were close at hand! Death! and
what a death! worse than any other that is to be named!
Water, be it cold or warm, that which buoys up blue ice-fields,
or which bathes tropical coasts with currents of
balmy bliss, is yet a gentle conqueror, kisses as it kills,
and draws you down gently through darkening fathoms to
its heart. Death at the sword is the festival of trumpet
and bugle and banner, with glory ringing out around you
and distant hearts thrilling through yours. No gnawing
disease can bring such hideous end as this; for that is a
fiend bred of your own flesh, and this — is it a fiend, this
living lump of appetites? What dread comes with the
thought of perishing in flames! but fire, let it leap and
hiss never so hotly, is something too remote, too alien, to
inspire us with such loathly horror as a wild beast; if it
have a life, that life is too utterly beyond our comprehension.
Fire is not half ourselves; as it devours, arouses
neither hatred nor disgust; is not to be known by the
strength of our lower natures let loose; does not drip
our blood into our faces from foaming chaps, nor mouth
nor slaver above us with vitality. Let us be ended by
fire, and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to
cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed
thing howls with us forever through the forest. All this
she felt as she charmed him, and what force it lent to her
song God knows. If her voice should fail! If the damp
and cold should give her any fatal hoarseness! If all the
silent powers of the forest did not conspire to help her!
The dark, hollow night rose indifferently over her; the
wide, cold air breathed rudely past her, lifted her wet hair

and blew it down again; the great boughs swung with a
ponderous strength, now and then clashed their iron lengths
together and shook off a sparkle of icy spears or some long-lain
weight of snow from their heavy shadows. The green
depths were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful
haunts that all the summer were hers and rejoiced to
share with her their bounty, these heavens that had yielded
their largess, these stems that had thrust their blossoms into
her hands, all these friends of three moons ago forgot her
now and knew her no longer.

Feeling her desolation, wild, melancholy, forsaken songs
rose thereon from that frightful aerie, — weeping, wailing
tunes, that sob among the people from age to age, and
overflow with otherwise unexpressed sadness, — all rude,
mournful ballads, — old tearful strains, that Shakespeare
heard the vagrants sing, and that rise and fall like the
wind and tide, — sailor-songs, to be heard only in lone
mid-watches beneath the moon and stars, — ghastly rhyming
romances, such as that famous one of the Lady Margaret,
when

Still the beast lay with closed eyes, yet never relaxing
his grasp. Once a half-whine of enjoyment escaped
him, — he fawned his fearful head upon her; once he
scored her cheek with his tongue: savage caresses that
hurt like wounds. How weary she was! and yet how
terribly awake! How fuller and fuller of dismay grew
the knowledge that she was only prolonging her anguish
and playing with death! How appalling the thought that
with her voice ceased her existence! Yet she could not

sing forever; her throat was dry and hard; her very
breath was a pain; her mouth was hotter than any desert-worn
pilgrim's; — if she could but drop upon her
burning tongue one atom of the ice that glittered about
her! — but both of her arms were pinioned in the giant's
vice. She remembered the winding-sheet, and for the
first time in her life shivered with spiritual fear. Was it
hers? She asked herself, as she sang, what sins she had
committed, what life she had led, to find her punishment
so soon and in these pangs, — and then she sought eagerly
for some reason why her husband was not up and
abroad to find her. He failed her, — her one sole hope
in life; and without being aware of it, her voice forsook
the songs of suffering and sorrow for old Covenanting
hymns, — hymns with which her mother had lulled her,
which the class-leader pitched in the chimney-corners, —
grand and sweet Methodist hymns, brimming with melody
and with all fantastic involutions of tune to suit that
ecstatic worship, — hymns full of the beauty of holiness,
steadfast, relying, sanctified by the salvation they had lent
to those in worse extremity than hers, — for they had
found themselves in the grasp of hell, while she was but
in the jaws of death. Out of this strange music, peculiar
to one character of faith, and than which there is none
more beautiful in its degree nor owning a more potent
sway of sound, her voice soared into the glorified chants
of churches. What to her was death by cold or famine
or wild beasts? “Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in him,” she sang. High and clear through the frore
fair night, the level moonbeams splintering in the wood,
the scarce glints of stars in the shadowy roof of branches,
these sacred anthems rose, — rose as a hope from despair,
as some snowy spray of flower-bells from blackest mould.
Was she not in God's hands? Did not the world swing
at his will? If this were in his great plan of providence,
was it not best, and should she not accept it?

“He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all
the earth.”

Oh, sublime faith of our fathers, where utter self-sacrifice
alone was true love, the fragrance of whose unrequired
subjection was pleasanter than that of golden
censers swung in purple-vapored chancels!

Never ceasing in the rhythm of her thoughts, articulated
in music as they thronged, the memory of her first
communion flashed over her. Again she was in that
distant place on that sweet spring morning. Again the
congregation rustled out, and the few remained, and she
trembled to find herself among them. How well she remembered
the devout, quiet faces, too accustomed to the
sacred feast to glow with their inner joy! how well the
snowy linen at the altar, the silver vessels slowly and silently
shifting! and as the cup approached and passed,
how the sense of delicious perfume stole in and heightened
the transport of her prayer, and she had seemed,
looking up through the windows where the sky soared
blue in constant freshness, to feel all heaven's balms dripping
from the portals, and to scent the lilies of eternal
peace! Perhaps another would not have felt so much
ecstasy as satisfaction on that occasion; but it is a true,
if a later disciple, who has said, “The Lord bestoweth his
blessings there, where he findeth the vessels empty.”

“And does it need the walls of a church to renew my
communion?” she asked. “Does not every moment
stand a temple four-square to God? And in that morning,
with its buoyant sunlight, was I any dearer to the
Heart of the World than now? — `My beloved is mine,

and I am his,'” she sang over and over again, with all
varied inflection and profuse tune. How gently all the
winter-wrapt things bent toward her then! into what relation
with her had they grown! how this common dependence
was the spell of their intimacy! how at one
with Nature had she become! how all the night and the
silence and the forest seemed to hold its breath, and to
send its soul up to God in her singing! It was no longer
despondency, that singing. It was neither prayer nor petition.
She had left imploring, “How long wilt thou forget
me, O Lord? Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the
sleep of death! For in death there is no remembrance
of thee,” — with countless other such fragments of supplication.
She cried rather, “Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for
thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort
me,” — and lingered, and repeated, and sang again, “I
shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.”

Then she thought of the Great Deliverance, when he
drew her up out of many waters, and the flashing old
psalm pealed forth triumphantly: —

She forgot how recently, and with what a strange pity
for her own shapeless form that was to be, she had
quaintly sung, —

She remembered instead, — “In thy presence is fulness
of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore.
God will redeem my soul from the power of
the grave: for he shall receive me. He will swallow
up death in victory.” Not once now did she say, “Lord,
how long wilt thou look on; rescue my soul from their
destructions, my darling from the lions,” — for she knew
that the young lions roar after their prey and seek their
meat from God. “O Lord, thou preservest man and
beast!” she said.

She had no comfort or consolation in this season, such
as sustained the Christian martyrs in the amphitheatre.
She was not dying for her faith; there were no palms in
heaven for her to wave; but how many a time had she
declared, — “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house
of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!”
And as the broad rays here and there broke through the
dense covert of shade and lay in rivers of lustre on crystal
sheathing and frozen fretting of trunk and limb and on
the great spaces of refraction, they builded up visibly that
house, the shining city on the hill, and singing, “Beautiful
for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion,
on the sides of the North, the city of the Great King,”
her vision climbed to that higher picture where the angel
shows the dazzling thing, the holy Jerusalem descending
out of heaven from God, with its splendid battlements and
gates of pearls, and its foundations, the eleventh a jacinth,
the twelfth an amethyst, — with its great white throne,
and the rainbow round about it, in sight like unto an emerald:
“And there shall be no night there, — for the
Lord God giveth them light,” she sang.

What whisper of dawn now rustled through the wilderness?
How the night was passing! And still the beast

crouched upon the bough, changing only the posture of
his head, that again he might command her with those
charmed eyes; — half their fire was gone; she could almost
have released herself from his custody; yet, had she
stirred, no one knows what malevolent instinct might have
dominated anew. But of that she did not dream; long
ago stripped of any expectation, she was experiencing in
her divine rapture how mystically true it is that “he that
dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide
under the shadow of the Almighty.”

Slow clarion cries now wound from the distance as
the cocks caught the intelligence of day and re-echoed
it faintly from farm to farm, — sleepy sentinels of night,
sounding the foe's invasion, and translating that dim intuition
to ringing notes of warning. Still she chanted on.
A remote crash of brushwood told of some other beast on
his depredations, or some night-belated traveller groping
his way through the narrow path. Still she chanted on.
The far, faint echoes of the chanticleers died into distance,
the crashing of the branches grew nearer. No wild beast
that, but a man's step, — a man's form in the moonlight,
stalwart and strong, — on one arm slept a little child, in
the other hand he held his gun. Still she chanted on.

Perhaps, when her husband last looked forth, he was
half ashamed to find what a fear he felt for her. He
knew she would never leave the child so long but for
some direst need, — and yet he may have laughed at himself,
as he lifted and wrapped it with awkward care, and,
loading his gun and strapping on his horn, opened the
door again and closed it behind him, going out and plunging
into the darkness and dangers of the forest. He was
more singularly alarmed than he would have been willing
to acknowledge; as he had sat with his bow hovering

over the strings, he had half believed to hear her voice
mingling gayly with the instrument, till he paused and
listened if she were not about to lift the latch and enter.
As he drew nearer the heart of the forest, that intimation
of melody seemed to grow more actual, to take body and
breath, to come and go on long swells and ebbs of the
night-breeze, to increase with tune and words, till a
strange shrill singing grew ever clearer, and, as he
stepped into an open space of moonbeams, far up in the
branches, rocked by the wind, and singing, “How beautiful
upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
good tidings, that publisheth peace,” he saw his wife, —
his wife, — but, great God in heaven! how? Some mad
exclamation escaped him, but without diverting her.
The child knew the singing voice, though never heard
before in that unearthly key, and turned toward it
through the veiling dreams. With a celerity almost instantaneous,
it lay, in the twinkling of an eye, on the
ground at the father's feet, while his gun was raised to
his shoulder and levelled at the monster covering his wife
with shaggy form and flaming gaze, — his wife so ghastly
white, so rigid, so stained with blood, her eyes so fixedly
bent above, and her lips, that had indurated into the
chiselled pallor of marble, parted only with that flood of
solemn song.

I do not know if it were the mother-instinct that for a
moment lowered her eyes, — those eyes, so lately riveted
on heaven, now suddenly seeing all life-long bliss possible.
A thrill of joy pierced and shivered through her like a
weapon, her voice trembled in its course, her glance lost
its steady strength, fever-flushes chased each other over
her face, yet she never once ceased chanting. She was
quite aware, that, if her husband shot now, the ball must

pierce her body before reaching any vital part of the
beast, — and yet better that death, by his hand, than the
other. But this her husband also knew, and he remained
motionless, just covering the creature with the sight. He
dared not fire, lest some wound not mortal should break
the spell exercised by her voice, and the beast, enraged
with pain, should rend her in atoms; moreover, the light
was too uncertain for his aim. So he waited. Now and
then he examined his gun to see if the damp were injuring
its charge, now and then he wiped the great drops
from his forehead. Again the cocks crowed with the
passing hour, — the last time they were heard on that
night. Cheerful home sound then, how full of safety and
all comfort and rest it seemed! what sweet morning incidents
of sparkling fire and sunshine, of gay household
bustle, shining dresser, and cooing baby, of steaming
cattle in the yard, and brimming milk-pails at the door!
what pleasant voices! what laughter! what security!
and here —

Now, as she sang on in the slow, endless, infinite moments,
the fervent vision of God's peace was gone. Just
as the grave had lost its sting, she was snatched back
again into the arms of earthly hope. In vain she tried
to sing, “There remaineth a rest for the people of God,”
— her eyes trembled on her husband's, and she could
only think of him, and of the child, and of happiness that
yet might be, but with what a dreadful gulf of doubt between!
She shuddered now in the suspense; all calm
forsook her; she was tortured with dissolving heats or
frozen with icy blasts; her face contracted, growing small
and pinched; her voice was hoarse and sharp, — every
tone cut like a knife, — the notes became heavy to lift, —
withheld by some hostile pressure, — impossible. One

gasp, a convulsive effort, and there was silence, — she
had lost her voice.

The beast made a sluggish movement, — stretched and
fawned like one awaking, — then, as if he would have yet
more of the enchantment, stirred her slightly with his
muzzle. As he did so, a sidelong hint of the man standing
below with the raised gun smote him; he sprung round
furiously, and, seizing his prey, was about to leap into
some unknown airy den of the topmost branches now
waving to the slow dawn. The late moon had rounded
through the sky so that her gleam at last fell full upon
the bough with fairy frosting; the wintry morning light
did not yet penetrate the gloom. The woman, suspended
in mid-air an instant, cast only one agonized glance beneath,
— but across and through it, ere the lids could fall,
shot a withering sheet of flame, — a rifle-crack, half-heard,
was lost in the terrible yell of desperation that
bounded after it and filled her ears with savage echoes,
and in the wide arc of some eternal descent she was falling;
— but the beast fell under her.

I think that the moment following must have been too
sacred for us, and perhaps the three have no special interest
again till they issue from the shadows of the wilderness
upon the white hills that skirt their home. The
father carries the child hushed again into slumber, the
mother follows with no such feeble step as might be anticipated.
It is not time for reaction, — the tension not yet
relaxed, the nerves still vibrant, she seems to herself like
some one newly made; the night was a dream; the present
stamped upon her in deep satisfaction, neither weighed
nor compared with the past; if she has the careful tricks
of former habit, it is as an automation; and as they slowly
climb the steep under the clear gray vault and the paling

morning star, and as she stops to gather a spray of the
red-rose berries or a feathery tuft of dead grasses for the
chimney-piece of the log-house, or a handful of brown
cones for the child's play, — of these quiet, happy folk
you would scarcely dream how lately they had stolen
from under the banner and encampment of the great
King Death. The husband proceeds a step or two in advance;
the wife lingers over a singular foot-print in the
snow, stoops and examines it, then looks up with a hurried
word. Her husband stands alone on the hill, his
arms folded across the babe, his gun fallen, — stands defined
as a silhouette against the pallid sky. What is there
in their home, lying below and yellowing in the light, to
fix him with such a stare? She springs to his side.
There is no home there. The log-house, the barns, the
neighboring farms, the fences, are all blotted out and mingled
in one smoking ruin. Desolation and death were indeed
there, and beneficence and life in the forest. Tomahawk
and scalping-knife, descending during that night,
had left behind them only this work of their accomplished
hatred and one subtle foot-print in the snow.

For the rest, — the world was all before them, where
to choose.