At this moment a smart rap, as if with a willow wand, was given at the house door, and Gyp, instead of barking, as might have been expected, gave a loud howl.  Adam, very much startled, went at once to the door and opened it.  Nothing was there; all was still, as when he opened it an hour before; the leaves were motionless, and the light of the stars showed the placid fields on both sides of the brook quite empty of visible life.  Adam walked round the house, and still saw nothing except a rat which darted into the woodshed as he passed.  He went in again, wondering; the sound was so peculiar that the moment he heard it it called up the image of the willow wand striking the door.  He could not help a little shudder, as he remembered how often his mother had told him of just such a sound coming as a sign when some one was dying.  Adam was not a man to be gratuitously superstitious, but he had the blood of the peasant in him as well as of the artisan, and a peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel.  Besides, he had that mental combination which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region of knowledge:  it was the depth of his reverence quite as much as his hard common sense which gave him his disinclination to doctrinal religion, and he often checked Seth’s argumentative spiritualism by saying, “Eh, it’s a big mystery; thee know’st but little about it.”  And so it happened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous.  If a new building had fallen down and he had been told that this was a divine judgment, he would have said, “May be; but the bearing o’ the roof and walls wasn’t right, else it wouldn’t ha’ come down”; yet he believed in dreams and prognostics, and to his dying day he bated his breath a little when he told the story of the stroke with the willow wand.  I tell it as he told it, not attempting to reduce it to its natural elements—­in our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our hold of the sympathy that comprehends them.

But he had the best antidote against imaginative dread in the necessity for getting on with the coffin, and for the next ten minutes his hammer was ringing so uninterruptedly, that other sounds, if there were any, might well be overpowered.  A pause came, however, when he had to take up his ruler, and now again came the strange rap, and again Gyp howled.  Adam was at the door without the loss of a moment; but again all was still, and the starlight showed there was nothing but the dew-laden grass in front of the cottage.

Adam for a moment thought uncomfortably about his father; but of late years he had never come home at dark hours from Treddleston, and there was every reason for believing that he was then sleeping off his drunkenness at the “Waggon Overthrown.”  Besides, to Adam, the conception of the future was so inseparable from the painful image of his father that the fear of any fatal accident to him was excluded by the deeply infixed fear of his continual degradation.  The next thought that occurred to him was one that made him slip off his shoes and tread lightly upstairs, to listen at the bedroom doors.  But both Seth and his mother were breathing regularly.