I hope I shall not prejudice the reader’s sympathies if my duty as a simple chronicler compels me to state, therefore, that the sober second thought of this gentle poet was to burn down the cabin on the spot with all its contents.  This yielded to a milder counsel—­waiting for the return of the party, challenging the Right Bower, a duel to the death, perhaps himself the victim, with the crushing explanation in extremis, “It seems we are one too many.  No matter; it is settled now.  Farewell!” Dimly remembering, however, that there was something of this in the last well-worn novel they had read together, and that his antagonist might recognize it, or even worse, anticipate it himself, the idea was quickly rejected.  Besides, the opportunity for an apotheosis of self-sacrifice was past.  Nothing remained now but to refuse the proffered bribe of claim and cabin by letter, for he must not wait their return.  He tore a leaf from a blotted diary, begun and abandoned long since, and essayed to write.  Scrawl after scrawl was torn up, until his fury had cooled down to a frigid third personality.  “Mr. John Ford regrets to inform his late partners that their tender of house, of furniture,” however, seemed too inconsistent with the pork-barrel table he was writing on; a more eloquent renunciation of their offer became frivolous and idiotic from a caricature of Union Mills, label and all, that appeared suddenly on the other side of the leaf; and when he at last indited a satisfactory and impassioned exposition of his feelings, the legible addendum of “Oh, ain’t you glad you’re out of the wilderness!”—­the forgotten first line of a popular song, which no scratching would erase—­seemed too like an ironical postscript to be thought of for a moment.  He threw aside his pen and cast the discordant record of past foolish pastime into the dead ashes of the hearth.

How quiet it was!  With the cessation of the rain the wind too had gone down, and scarcely a breath of air came through the open door.  He walked to the threshold and gazed on the hushed prospect.  In this listless attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant reverberation, a mere phantom of sound—­perhaps the explosion of a distant blast in the hills—­that left the silence more marked and oppressive.  As he turned again into the cabin a change seemed to have come over it.  It already looked old and decayed.  The loneliness of years of desertion seemed to have taken possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in the beams and rafters.  To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to a withered and mummied corpse.  So it might look in after-years when some passing stranger—­but he stopped.  A dread of the place was beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the