lies, poor and helpless, under the mould, a pinch of dust, a heap of
bones, an evil odor! I hate the thought! It shall not be so!"

It was strange how every little incident thus brought him back to that one
subject which was taking so strong hold of his mind; every avenue led
thitherward; and he took it for an indication that nature had intended, by
innumerable ways, to point out to us the great truth that death was an
alien misfortune, a prodigy, a monstrosity, into which man had only fallen
by defect; and that even now, if a man had a reasonable portion of his
original strength in him, he might live forever and spurn death.

Our story is an internal one, dealing as little as possible with outward
events, and taking hold of these only where it cannot be helped, in order
by means of them to delineate the history of a mind bewildered in certain
errors. We would not willingly, if we could, give a lively and picturesque
surrounding to this delineation, but it is necessary that we should advert
to the circumstances of the time in which this inward history was passing.
We will say, therefore, that that night there was a cry of alarm passing
all through the succession of country towns and rural communities that lay
around Boston, and dying away towards the coast and the wilder forest
borders. Horsemen galloped past the line of farm-houses shouting alarm!
alarm! There were stories of marching troops coming like dreams through
the midnight. Around the little rude meeting-houses there was here and
there the beat of a drum, and the assemblage of farmers with their
weapons. So all that night there was marching, there was mustering, there
was trouble; and, on the road from Boston, a steady march of soldiers'
feet onward, onward into the land whose last warlike disturbance had been
when the red Indians trod it.

Septimius heard it, and knew, like the rest, that it was the sound of