"No wonder," said the Doctor bluffly. "You have been letting slip the
vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not
clothe yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently.
Beef and brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of
them."

The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder
of his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There
seemed, from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of
refinement in his race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit,
which either was in itself a want of force, or was necessarily
connected with it, and which, the Doctor silently thought, had
culminated in the person before him.

"It was always in us," continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good
or evil. "We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the
causes that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had
suffered so much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had
been his track, that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this
land his foot left a print of blood wherever he trod." [Endnote: 5.]




CHAPTER VII.


"A print of blood!" said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by