couple of darkey lovers whispered on doorsteps.  No birds, nor even crickets, serenaded the torpid night.  The shuffling feet of Andrew Waples barely made watch-dogs growl in their dreams, and started his own heart with the concussions they produced on the arborescent and deeply-shadowed aisles of the after midnight.  He saw the town-hall clock pallidly illuminated above its tower.  The low frame villa of Chancellor Walworth, cowering amongst the pine-trees, expressed the burden of parricidal blood that had of late oppressed its memories.  There were no murmurs from the court-room where Judge Barnard had been tried, but its deep silence seemed from the clock to tick:  “Removed! disqualified!” and “Disqualified! removed!”

Turning from Broadway to lesser streets of cheap hotels and plain boarding cottages, where weary women and girls had drudged all day long, and washerwomen moaned and fluting and ruffling were the amusements of the poor, Andrew Waples became haunted with the idea that Saratoga was poisoned, that every soul in the village was dead, and that he was to be the last man of the century to drink of the Springs.  Nature and night were in the swoon of love or death.  Parting their drowsy curtains went Waples through the muffled echoes, impelled by nothing greater than a human thirst.

He saw his shadow, at length, fall down the steep stairs of the valley of High Rock Spring, as he stood at the top of the steps uncovered to the moon.  It was a shadow nearly a hundred feet long, a high-cheeked head without a chin and all nose, like the profile of a mountain.  But what was extraordinary was the total absence of an abdominal part to Mr. Waples’ exaggerated shadow, for he distinctly saw a young maple-tree, in perfect moonlight, grow through the cavity where his stomach ought to have been.

“I must be hollow,” said Andrew, as he looked,—­“the frame of a stomach removed; for surely my whole figure is in blackness, except my bread-basket.”  But his fears were dissipated by the sound of voices, of glasses clinking and water running, and the evident semblance of life at the High Rock Spring in the ravine beneath, to which the steep stairs descended.  At the same moment he descried another shadow propelled alongside his own, as if from some far distance in the rear a human object was slowly advancing to stand beside him.

There were very old wooden houses around this precipice or promontory of Saratoga, some of them a hundred years old, and decrepit and in ruins; for here, at the High Rock, was the original fountain of the village.  As if from the cover of one of these old and decaying tenements came a person of venerable aspect, with a tray of glasses fastened to the top of a staff, like a great caster of bottles on a broomstick.  As this person stood by the side of Andrew Waples, and planted his staff on the top step of the stairs, his prolonged shadow, falling in the valley, gave him the appearance of a gigantic Neptune, with a trident in his hand.