dignified and majestic person, arrayed, it may be supposed, in the
flowing garments of an ancient sage, would be the bearer of a wand, or
prophet's rod. With this wand, or rod, or staff, the venerable sage
would trace a certain figure in the air, and then proceed to make
known his heaven-instructed message; which, if obeyed, must lead to
glorious results.

With this proud fate before him, in the flush of his imaginative
youth, Ralph Cranfield had set forth to seek the maid, the treasure,
and the venerable sage, with his gift of extended empire. And had he
found them? Alas! it was not with the aspect of a triumphant man, who
had achieved a nobler destiny than all his fellows, but rather with
the gloom of one struggling against peculiar and continual adversity,
that he now passed homeward to his mother's cottage. He had come
back, but only for a time, to lay aside the pilgrim's staff, trusting
that his weary manhood would regain somewhat of the elasticity of
youth, in the spot where his threefold fate had been foreshown him.
There had been few changes in the village; for it was not one of those
thriving places where a year's prosperity makes more than the havoc of
a century's decay; but like a gray hair in a young man's head, an
antiquated little town, full of old maids, and aged elms, and moss-
grown dwellings. Few seemed to be the changes here. The drooping
elms, indeed, had a more majestic spread; the weather-blackened houses
were adorned with a denser thatch of verdant moss; and doubtless there
were a few more gravestones in the burial-ground, inscribed with names
that had once been familiar in the village street. Yet, summing up
all the mischief that ten years had wrought, it seemed scarcely more
than if Ralph Cranfield had gone forth that very morning, and dreamed
a daydream till the twilight, and then turned back again. But his
heart grew cold, because the village did not remember him as he