In the mean time Captain Obadiah had become so accustomed to the presence of his guest that he made no pretence of any concealment of that iniquitous, dreadful avocation that lent to Pig and Sow Point so great a terror in those parts.  Rather did the West Indian appear to court the open observation of his dependant.

One exquisite day in the last of October our young gentleman had spent the greater part of the afternoon in the society of the beautiful object of his regard.  The leaves, though fallen from the trees in great abundance, appeared thereby only to have admitted of the passage of a riper radiance of golden sunlight through the thinning branches.  This and the ardor of his passion had so transported our hero that when he had departed from her presence he seemed to walk as light as a feather, and knew not whether it was the warmth of the sunlight or the heat of his own impetuous transports that filled the universe with so extreme a brightness.

Overpowered with these absorbing and transcendent introspections, he approached his now odious home upon Pig and Sow Point by way of the old meeting-house.  There of a sudden he came upon his patron, Captain Obadiah, superintending the burial of the last of three victims of his odious commerce, who had died that afternoon.  Two had already been interred, and the third new-made grave was in the process of being filled.  Two men, one a negro and the other a white, had nearly completed their labor, tramping down the crumbling earth as they shovelled it into the shallow excavation.  Meanwhile Captain Obadiah stood near by, his red coat flaming in the slanting light, himself smoking a pipe of tobacco with all the ease and coolness imaginable.  His hands, clasped behind his back, held his ivory-headed cane, and as our hero approached he turned an evil countenance upon him, and greeted him with a grin at once droll, mischievous, and malevolent in the extreme.  “And how is our pretty charmer this afternoon?” quoth Captain Obadiah.

Conceive, if you please, of a man floating in the most ecstatic delight of heaven pulled suddenly thence down into the most filthy extremity of hell, and then you shall understand the motions of disgust and repugnance and loathing that overpowered our hero, who, awakening thus suddenly out of his dream of love, found himself in the presence of that grim and obscene spectacle of death—­who, arousing from such absorbing and exquisite meditations, heard his ears greeted with so rude and vulgar an address.

Acknowledging to himself that he did not dare offer an immediate reply to his host, he turned upon his heel and walked away, without expressing a single word.