deep with his footsteps and trodden down hard; and it was believed by some
of his superstitious neighbors that the grass and little shrubs shrank
away from his path, and made it wider on that account; because there was
something in the broodings that urged him to and fro along the path alien
to nature and its productions. There was another opinion, too, that an
invisible fiend, one of his relatives by blood, walked side by side with
him, and so made the pathway wider than his single footsteps could have
made it. But all this was idle, and was, indeed, only the foolish babble
that hovers like a mist about men who withdraw themselves from the throng,
and involve themselves in unintelligible pursuits and interests of their
own. For the present, the small world, which alone knew of him, considered
Septimius as a studious young man, who was fitting for the ministry, and
was likely enough to do credit to the ministerial blood that he drew from
his ancestors, in spite of the wild stream that the Indian priest had
contributed; and perhaps none the worse, as a clergyman, for having an
instinctive sense of the nature of the Devil from his traditionary claims
to partake of his blood. But what strange interest there is in tracing out
the first steps by which we enter on a career that influences our life;
and this deep-worn pathway on the hill-top, passing and repassing by a
grave, seemed to symbolize it in Septimius's case.

I suppose the morbidness of Septimius's disposition was excited by the
circumstances which had put the paper into his possession. Had he received
it by post, it might not have impressed him; he might possibly have looked
over it with ridicule, and tossed it aside. But he had taken it from a
dying man, and he felt that his fate was in it; and truly it turned out to
be so. He waited for a fit opportunity to open it and read it; he put it
off as if he cared nothing about it; perhaps it was because he cared so
much. Whenever he had a happy time with Rose (and, moody as Septimius was,
such happy moments came), he felt that then was not the time to look into