The missionary looked down in surprise at as singular a knot of people as could have been selected from all his heterogeneous auditors.  Indeed, considering that we might all be classified under the general head of Vagabond, there was great diversity of character among the grave old showman, the sly, prophetic beggar, the fiddling foreigner and his merry damsel, the smart bibliopolist, the sombre Indian and myself, the itinerant novelist, a slender youth of eighteen.  I even fancied that a smile was endeavoring to disturb the iron gravity of the preacher’s mouth.

“Good people,” answered he, “the camp-meeting is broke up.”

So saying, the Methodist minister switched his steed and rode westward.  Our union being thus nullified by the removal of its object, we were sundered at once to the four winds of heaven.  The fortune-teller, giving a nod to all and a peculiar wink to me, departed on his Northern tour, chuckling within himself as he took the Stamford road.  The old showman and his literary coadjutor were already tackling their horses to the wagon with a design to peregrinate south-west along the sea-coast.  The foreigner and the merry damsel took their laughing leave and pursued the eastern road, which I had that day trodden; as they passed away the young man played a lively strain and the girl’s happy spirit broke into a dance, and, thus dissolving, as it were, into sunbeams and gay music, that pleasant pair departed from my view.  Finally, with a pensive shadow thrown across my mind, yet emulous of the light philosophy of my late companions, I joined myself to the Penobscot Indian and set forth toward the distant city.

THE WHITE OLD MAID.

The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows and showed a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion.  From one lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the ghostly light through the other slept upon a bed, falling between the heavy silken curtains and illuminating the face of a young man.  But how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features!  And how like a shroud the sheet was wound about his frame!  Yes, it was a corpse in its burial-clothes.

Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion.  Strange fantasy!  It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and a girl stole softly to the bedside.  Was there delusion in the moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as she bent over the pale corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living lips to the cold ones of the dead?  As she drew back from that long kiss her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its anguish.  Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved responsive to her own.  Still an illusion.  The silken curtains had waved a second time betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as another fair young girl unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside.  There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between them.  But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.