days, and cannot last until sunrise. Or perhaps some mother, drowsily
hushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment and listens vacantly to the
birds singing. But who else?

The hubbub suddenly ceases,--ceases as suddenly as it began,--and
all is still again in the woodland. But it is not so dark as before.
A faint glow of white light is discernible behind the ragged line of
the tree-tops. The deluge of the darkness is receding from the face
of the earth, as the mighty waters receded of old.

The roofs and tall factory chimneys of Stillwater are slowly
taking shape in the gloom. Is that a cemetery coming into view
yonder, with its ghostly architecture of obelisks and broken columns
and huddled head-stones? No, that is only Slocum's Marble Yard, with
the finished and unfinished work heaped up like snowdrifts,--a
cemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lantern
glimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are having their fodder
betimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearest
rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate old
cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along
the gray of the serpentine turnpike,--a cart, with the driver lashing
a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and is lost in the
forest.

Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the
horizon.

Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun to
twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itself
known to the doves in the stone belfry of the South Church. The