THE work of the day being over, I sat down upon my doorstep,
pipe in hand, to rest awhile in the cool of the evening. Death is not
more still than is this Virginian land in the hour when the sun has
sunk away, and it is black beneath the trees, and the stars brighten
slowly and softly, one by one. The birds that sing all day have
hushed, and the horned owls, the monster frogs, and that strange
and ominous fowl (if fowl it be, and not, as some assert, a spirit
damned) which we English call the whippoorwill, are yet silent.
Later the wolf will howl and the panther scream, but now there is
no sound. The winds are laid, and the restless leaves droop and are
quiet. The low lap of the water among the reeds is like the
breathing of one who sleeps in his watch beside the dead.

I marked the light die from the broad bosom of the river, leaving it
a dead man's hue. Awhile ago, and for many evenings, it had been
crimson, - a river of blood. A week before, a great meteor had shot
through the night, blood-red and bearded, drawing a slow-fading
fiery trail across the heavens; and the moon had risen that same
night blood-red, and upon its disk there was drawn in shadow a
thing most marvelously like a scalping knife. Wherefore, the
following day being Sunday, good Mr. Stockham, our minister at
Weyanoke, exhorted us to be on our guard, and in his prayer
besought that no sedition or rebellion might raise its head amongst
the Indian subjects of the Lord's anointed. Afterward, in the
churchyard, between the services, the more timorous began to tell
of divers portents which they had observed, and to recount old
tales of how the savages distressed us in the Starving Time. The
bolder spirits laughed them to scorn, but the women began to weep