giving vent to the suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal.  At times the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the sides of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the blind instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and bury his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust.  At last, the paroxysm past, he sank back again into his old apathetic attitude of watching, the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible.  In this attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.

It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first, and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes; it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose shores expanded at last into one illimitable ocean, cerulean no more, but flecked with crimson and opal dyes; it came with the lightly lifted misty curtain of the day, torn and rent on crag and pine-top, but always lifting, lifting.  It came with the sparkle of emerald in the grasses, and the flash of diamonds in every spray, with a whisper in the awakening woods, and voices in the traveled roads and trails.

The sound of these voices stopped before the pit, and seemed to interrogate the old man.  He came, and, putting his finger on his lips, made a sign of caution.  When three or four men had descended he bade them follow him, saying, weakly and disjointedly, but persistently:  “My boy—­my son Robert—­came home—­came home at last—­here with Flip—­both of them—­come and see!”

He had reached a little niche or nest in the hillside, and stopped, and suddenly drew aside a blanket.  Beneath it, side by side, lay Flip and Lance, dead, with their cold hands clasped in each other’s.

“Suffocated!” said two or three, turning with horror toward the broken up and still smouldering pit.

“Asleep!” said the old man.  “Asleep!  I’ve seen ’em lying that way when they were babies together.  Don’t tell me!  Don’t say I don’t know my own flesh and blood!  So! so!  So, my pretty ones!” He stooped and kissed them.  Then, drawing the blanket over them gently, he rose and said softly, “Good night!”

FOUND AT BLAZING STAR.

The rain had only ceased with the gray streaks of morning at Blazing Star, and the settlement awoke to a moral sense of cleanliness, and the finding of forgotten knives, tin cups, and smaller camp utensils, where the heavy showers had washed away the debris and dust heaps before the cabin-doors.  Indeed, it was recorded in Blazing Star that a fortunate early riser had once picked up on the highway a solid chunk of gold quartz which the rain had freed from its incumbering soil, and washed into immediate and glittering popularity.  Possibly this may have been the reason why early risers in that locality, during the rainy season, adopted a thoughtful habit of body, and seldom lifted their eyes to the rifted or india-ink washed skies above them.