rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the hearth for
the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving to the ledge the
look of an envelope which has passed through innumerable post-offices.

Fancy was gliding about the room preparing dinner, her head inclining now
to the right, now to the left, and singing the tips and ends of tunes
that sprang up in her mind like mushrooms. The footsteps of Mrs. Day
could be heard in the room overhead. Fancy went finally to the door.

"Father! Dinner."

A tall spare figure was seen advancing by the window with periodical
steps, and the keeper entered from the garden. He appeared to be a man
who was always looking down, as if trying to recollect something he said
yesterday. The surface of his face was fissured rather than wrinkled,
and over and under his eyes were folds which seemed as a kind of exterior
eyelids. His nose had been thrown backwards by a blow in a poaching
fray, so that when the sun was low and shining in his face, people could
see far into his head. There was in him a quiet grimness, which would in
his moments of displeasure have become surliness, had it not been
tempered by honesty of soul, and which was often wrongheadedness because
not allied with subtlety.

Although not an extraordinarily taciturn man among friends slightly
richer than himself, he never wasted words upon outsiders, and to his
trapper Enoch his ideas were seldom conveyed by any other means than nods
and shakes of the head. Their long acquaintance with each other's ways,
and the nature of their labours, rendered words between them almost
superfluous as vehicles of thought, whilst the coincidence of their
horizons, and the astonishing equality of their social views, by