garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectre-like.

"Well, folks," remarked Silas, "you'll be wishing yourselves back to
town again, if this weather holds."

And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell
silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes
intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow. The storm,
in its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary. It seemed to have
arisen for our especial behoof,--a symbol of the cold, desolate,
distrustful phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of
adventurous enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of
ordinary life.

But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be
depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if
it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. There
have been few brighter seasons for us than that. If ever men might
lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions
without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience,--yes,
and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an
object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained, we who
made that little semicircle round the blazing fire were those very
men. We had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we
had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep
most people on the weary treadmill of the established system, even
while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We
had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had
shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching,
enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the