a black silk handkerchief, gazing down at the long, low roof of Myrtle
Forge, built by his great, great grandfather Gilbert over a hundred and
ten years before. It was February, and he could hear the ringing blows
of axes, cutting the ice out of the forebay to liberate the water power
for the completion of a forging of iron destined to be rolled into
tracks for the slowly lengthening Columbia Steam Railway System. It was
midday, a grey sky held a brighter, diffused radiance where the veiled
sun hung without warmth, and the earth was everywhere frozen
granite-like. He could see beyond the Forge shed heaped charcoal, and
the black mass seemed no more dead than the ground or bare, brittle
trees sweeping down and up to where, on encircling hills, they were
lifted sharply against the cloudy monotony.

He was ordinarily impervious to the influence of weather, the more
depressing aspects of nature; but now he was conscious of a dejection
communicated, in part at least, he felt, by the bleak prospect without.
Another, and infinitely more arresting, reason for this feeling had just
stirred his thoughts--for the first time he was conscious of the
invidious, beginning weariness of accumulating years. He was hardly past
forty, and he impatiently repudiated the possibility that he was
actually declining; in fact he had not yet reached the zenith of his
capabilities, physical or mental; yet his broken arm, slow in mending,
the pain, had unquestionably depleted him more than a similar accident
ten years ago. Not only this, but, during the forced inaction, his mind
had definitely taken a different cast; considerations that had seemed to
constitute the main business of existence had lately faded before
preoccupations and feelings ignored until now.

Jasper Penny saw, objectively, not so much the surrounding circumstance
as his own former acts and emotions; detached from his habitual being by