The reading was interrupted by a shaking of the house, as by the fall of a heavy object.  The reader flung down the book, rushed from the room and mounted the stairs to Fleming’s bed-chamber.  He tried the door, but contrary to his instructions it was locked.  He set his shoulder against it with such force that it gave way.  On the floor near the disordered bed, in his night clothes, lay Fleming gasping away his life.

The physician raised the dying man’s head from the floor and observed a wound in the throat.  “I should have thought of this,” he said, believing it suicide.

When the man was dead an examination disclosed the unmistakable marks of an animal’s fangs deeply sunken into the jugular vein.

But there was no animal.

A RESUMED IDENTITY

I—­THE REVIEW AS A FORM OF WELCOME

One summer night a man stood on a low hill overlooking a wide expanse of forest and field.  By the full moon hanging low in the west he knew what he might not have known otherwise:  that it was near the hour of dawn.  A light mist lay along the earth, partly veiling the lower features of the landscape, but above it the taller trees showed in well-defined masses against a clear sky.  Two or three farmhouses were visible through the haze, but in none of them, naturally, was a light.  Nowhere, indeed, was any sign or suggestion of life except the barking of a distant dog, which, repeated with mechanical iteration, served rather to accentuate than dispel the loneliness of the scene.

The man looked curiously about him on all sides, as one who among familiar surroundings is unable to determine his exact place and part in the scheme of things.  It is so, perhaps, that we shall act when, risen from the dead, we await the call to judgment.

A hundred yards away was a straight road, showing white in the moonlight.  Endeavoring to orient himself, as a surveyor or navigator might say, the man moved his eyes slowly along its visible length and at a distance of a quarter-mile to the south of his station saw, dim and gray in the haze, a group of horsemen riding to the north.  Behind them were men afoot, marching in column, with dimly gleaming rifles aslant above their shoulders.  They moved slowly and in silence.  Another group of horsemen, another regiment of infantry, another and another—­all in unceasing motion toward the man’s point of view, past it, and beyond.  A battery of artillery followed, the cannoneers riding with folded arms on limber and caisson.  And still the interminable procession came out of the obscurity to south and passed into the obscurity to north, with never a sound of voice, nor hoof, nor wheel.

The man could not rightly understand:  he thought himself deaf; said so, and heard his own voice, although it had an unfamiliar quality that almost alarmed him; it disappointed his ear’s expectancy in the matter of timbre and resonance.  But he was not deaf, and that for the moment sufficed.