When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his ax to hew out a farm—­the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support—­he was young, strong and full of hope.  In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart.  There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it!  Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man’s widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that?

One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious.  There was no physician within miles, no neighbor; nor was she in a condition to be left, to summon help.  So he set about the task of nursing her back to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness and so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.

From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather.  When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial.  In performance of this sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over.  His occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural laws.  He was surprised, too, that he did not weep—­surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead.  “To-morrow,” he said aloud, “I shall have to make the coffin and dig the grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but now—­she is dead, of course, but it is all right—­it must be all right, somehow.  Things cannot be so bad as they seem.”

He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically, with soulless care.  And still through his consciousness ran an undersense of conviction that all was right—­that he should have her again as before, and everything explained.  He had had no experience in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use.  His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it.  He did not know he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go.  Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant