and vanished as if they had fallen over a cliff.  The woodman pioneer is no more; the pioneer of the plains—­he whose easy task it was to subdue for occupancy two-thirds of the country in a single generation—­is another and inferior creation.  With Charles Marlowe in the wilderness, sharing the dangers, hardships and privations of that strange, unprofitable life, were his wife and child, to whom, in the manner of his class, in which the domestic virtues were a religion, he was passionately attached.  The woman was still young enough to be comely, new enough to the awful isolation of her lot to be cheerful.  By withholding the large capacity for happiness which the simple satisfactions of the forest life could not have filled, Heaven had dealt honorably with her.  In her light household tasks, her child, her husband and her few foolish books, she found abundant provision for her needs.

One morning in midsummer Marlowe took down his rifle from the wooden hooks on the wall and signified his intention of getting game.

“We’ve meat enough,” said the wife; “please don’t go out to-day.  I dreamed last night, O, such a dreadful thing!  I cannot recollect it, but I’m almost sure that it will come to pass if you go out.”

It is painful to confess that Marlowe received this solemn statement with less of gravity than was due to the mysterious nature of the calamity foreshadowed.  In truth, he laughed.

“Try to remember,” he said.  “Maybe you dreamed that Baby had lost the power of speech.”

The conjecture was obviously suggested by the fact that Baby, clinging to the fringe of his hunting-coat with all her ten pudgy thumbs was at that moment uttering her sense of the situation in a series of exultant goo-goos inspired by sight of her father’s raccoon-skin cap.

The woman yielded:  lacking the gift of humor she could not hold out against his kindly badinage.  So, with a kiss for the mother and a kiss for the child, he left the house and closed the door upon his happiness forever.

At nightfall he had not returned.  The woman prepared supper and waited.  Then she put Baby to bed and sang softly to her until she slept.  By this time the fire on the hearth, at which she had cooked supper, had burned out and the room was lighted by a single candle.  This she afterward placed in the open window as a sign and welcome to the hunter if he should approach from that side.  She had thoughtfully closed and barred the door against such wild animals as might prefer it to an open window —­of the habits of beasts of prey in entering a house uninvited she was not advised, though with true female prevision she may have considered the possibility of their entrance by way of the chimney.  As the night wore on she became not less anxious, but more drowsy, and at last rested her arms upon the bed by the child and her head upon the arms.  The candle in the window burned down to the socket, sputtered and flared a moment and went out unobserved; for the woman slept and dreamed.