I have spoken of the cheerlessness of the heavens.  It was one of those nights when the sky, piled thick with hurrying clouds, hangs above one like a pall.  But the moon, hidden behind these rushing masses, was at its full, and the judge soon found that he could see his way better than he had anticipated—­better than was desirable, perhaps.  He had been on the descent of the path for some little time now, and could not be far from the more level ground which marked the approach to Long Bridge.  Determined not to stop or to cast one faltering look to right or left, he hurried on with his eyes fixed upon the ground and every nerve braced to resist the influence of the place and its undying memories.  But with the striking of his foot against the boards of the bridge, nature was too much for him, and his resolve vanished.  Instead of hastening on, he stopped; and, having stopped, paused long enough to take in all the features of the scene, and any changes which time might have wrought.  He even forced his shrinking eyes to turn and gaze upon the exact spot where his beloved Algernon had been found, with his sightless eyes turned to the sky.

This latter place, singular in that it lay open to the opposite bank without the mask of bush or tree to hide it, was in immediate proximity to the end of the bridge he had attempted to cross.  It bore the name of Dark Hollow, and hollow and dark it looked in the universal gloom.  But the power of its associations was upon him, and before he knew it, he was retracing his steps as though drawn by a magnetism he could not resist, till he stood within this hollow and possibly on the very foot of ground from the mere memory of which he had recoiled for years.

A moment of contemplation—­a sigh, such as only escapes the bursting heart in moments of extreme grief or desolation—­and he tore his eyes from the ground to raise them slowly but with deep meaning to where the high line of trees on the opposite side of the ravine met the grey vault of the sky.  Darkness piled itself against darkness, but with a difference to one who knew all the undulations of this bluff and just where it ended in the sheer fall which gave a turn to the road at the farther end of the bridge.

But it was not upon the mass of undistinguishable tree-tops or the line they made against the sky that his gaze lingered.  It was on something more material; something which rose from the brow of the hill in stark and curious outline not explainable in itself, but clear enough to one who had seen its shape by daylight.  Judge Ostrander had thus seen it many times in the past, and knew just where to look for the one remaining chimney and solitary gable of a house struck many years before by lightning and left a grinning shell to mock the eye of all who walked this path or crossed this bridge.

Black amid blackness, with just the contrast of its straight lines to the curve of natural objects about it, it commanded the bluff, summoning up memories of an evil race cut short in a moment by an outraged Providence, and Judge Ostrander marking it, found himself muttering aloud as he dragged himself slowly away:  “Why should Time, so destructive elsewhere, leave one stone upon another of this accursed ruin?”