When Swan tried to move the stone, a thousand ugly things swarmed from beneath it.  He dropped it, shuddering, and passed on.  A white marble tablet of some pretension stood near, and recorded the names of

  ZEPHANIAH FOX,

  AND

  AZUBAH, HIS WIFE.

  They died the, same day and their bones rest
  here, till the final resurrection.

He glanced at the date,—­

  JUNE 14th, 1805.

And he had never heard of it!—­never guessed it!  But then, he had not heard at all from Dorcas.  Poor Dorcas! how had she borne this sudden and terrible bereavement?  All that he might have been to her in her sorrow, for one moment all that he had not been, floated by him.  The yellow melted away that had so long incrusted his soul, and he felt on his bared breast, as it were, the fresh air of truth and constancy,—­of all that makes life worth the having.

He drove away,—­away over the broad fields and the well-remembered meadows, out upon the Dummerston road, and over the Ridge Hill.  Well, life was not all behind him!

He took out his watch.  It was time to keep his appointment.  He left the horse at the tavern-door, and walked up the road towards the trysting-place, the old pear-tree.  He looked wistfully at it, and sprang over the wall, with considerable effort, as he could not but admit to himself.  That old pear-tree!  They had called it old fifteen years ago,—­and here it stood, as proud and strong as then!  The two great branches that stretched towards the south, and which he had often thought had something benignant in their aspect, as if they would bless the wayfarer or the sojourner under their shade, still reached forth and spread abroad their strong arms.  But to-night, whether from his own excited imagination, or because the early frosts had stripped it of its leaves and so bereaved it of all that gave grace to its aspect, or perhaps from the deepening twilight,—­however it was, the old tree had a different expression, and stretched forth two skeleton arms with a sort of half-warning, half-mocking gesture, that sent a shudder over his frame, already disturbed by the successive presence, in the last two or three hours, of more emotions than he could comfortably sustain.

Swan was not an imaginative person.  Yet the tree looked to him like a living, sentient thing, dooming him and warning him.  As in the compression of the brain in drowning, it is said forgotten memories are hustled uppermost, and the events of early life vividly written on the consciousness,—­so in this unwonted stir of past and present associations, Swan found himself remembering, with a thrill of pleasure that was chased by a spasm of pain, the last evening on which he had parted from Dorcas.  He remembered, as if it were but now, how he had turned towards the pear-tree, when Dorcas had gone out of sight and he dared not follow her, and that the pear-tree had seemed to hear, to see, to sympathize with him,—­that it had spread out great blessing arms on the southern air, and had seemed to encourage and strengthen his hopes of a happy return.