unguessed reason for all these mysteries;--the hidden treasure or
the hidden sorrow which would explain why he, their first citizen,
the respected, even revered judge of their highest court, should
make use of such precautions and show such unvarying determination
to bar out all comers from the place he called his home.

It had not always been so. Within the memory of many there it had
been an abode of cheer and good fellowship. Not a few of the men
and women now hesitating before its portals could boast of meals
taken at the judge's ample board, and of evenings spent in
animated conversation in the great room where he kept his books
and did his writing.

But that was before his son left him in so unaccountable a manner;
before--yes, all were agreed on this point--before that other
bitter ordeal of his middle age, the trial and condemnation of the
man who had waylaid and murdered his best friend.

Though the effect of these combined sorrows had not seemed to be
immediate (one month had seen both); though a half-year had
elapsed before all sociability was lost in extreme self-
absorption, and a full one before he took down the picket-fence
which had hitherto been considered a sufficient protection to his
simple grounds, and put up these boards which had so completely
isolated him from the rest of the world, it was evident enough to
the friends who recalled his look and step as he walked the
streets with Algernon Etheridge on one side and his brilliant,
ever-successful son on the other, that the change now observable
in him was due to the violent sundering of these two ties.
Affections so centred wreck the lives from which they are torn;