The Judge never admitted it; that seemed to be a part of his religion, a duty to himself, if painful, and the son never woke nor retired to rest without searching in that paternal shadow for the kindly gleam of awakened love, yet ever kissed the shadow only, and a brow that was cold.

One Christmas Day the river was frozen—­a rare event in that genial latitude, and hearing that wild geese were flying down toward the bay creeks and coves, the Judge took his gun and a negro and set off, without waiting for Perry, who was not immediately to be found.  An hour later the boy returned and heard of his father’s departure, and started on horseback to overtake the carriage.  He followed the track beyond the mill and almshouse, and across the heads of several peninsulas or necks leading into the wide tidal river.  A few frosted persimmons hung yet to their warty branches; the hulls of last autumn’s black walnuts were beneath the spreading boughs; old orchards of peach-trees where the tints of green and bud smouldered in pink contrast to the oft-blackened and sapless branches, set off the purple beads of the haw on the bushes along the lanes.  Fish-hawks, flying across the sky, felt the shadow of the flocks of wild ducks flying higher; and rabbits crossed the road so boldly in the face of Perry Whaley, that once a raccoon, limping across a cornfield like a lame spaniel, turned too and took both barrels of Perry’s gun without other fright or injury than slightly to hurry its pace.  As the young man heard the crows chatter around the corn-shocks and the mocking-bird in some alder-thicket answer and sauce the catbird’s scream, he said to himself: 

“Every thing is attached by an inner chord to something else, and that other thing, free-hearted, carols or quarrels back—­except father to me.  Can I not, too, find something to love me?  There is Marion, the Doctor’s daughter, with the chestnut curls falling all round her neck—­she loves me, I know; but until I gain my father’s love I cannot think of woman!”

The pine-trees above his head murmured rather than moaned, as if they strongly sympathized with him and would presently make loud and angry cause against his enemies.  “What is it,” asked Perry of his unsuspecting mind, “which makes my father so unappeasable?  What is there in me which broods upon his just and honorable life, and which he cannot drive away though he tries?  Has he some learned superstition, some religious vow or mistaken sacrifice?”

Perry turned down a lane and then into the bed of a frozen brook, and coming in sight of the broad river, espied his father, gun in hand, stealthily creeping under a load of brush and twigs which the Judge’s negro had piled about his back and head, to conceal his figure from a flock of ducks that were bathing and diving in an open place of deep water, to which the ice had not extended.