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To me, whose heart was haunted, the disht, were less than nothing All day I had looked for one sight of horror; yea, had longed to come at last upon it, to fall beside it, to eh it should be some fair and sunny spot, there would be loom and stillness, it fell in withsunshine were this cold and soleed pines It was a place in which to think of life as a slight thing and scarcely worth the while, given without the asking, spent in turs all in vain Easily laid down, too,--so easily laid down that the wonder was-I looked at the ghostly wood, and at the dull stream, and at my hand upon the hilt of the sword that I had drawn halfway from the scabbard The life within that hand I had not asked for Why should I stand like a soldier left to guard a thing not worth the guarding; seeing his co a cry to hih from its sheath; and then of a sudden I saw the ht; knew that I was indeed the soldier, and willed to be neither coward nor deserter The blade dropped back into the scabbard with a clang, and, straightening ish stream deep into the haunted wood

Presently it occurred to lance aside at the Indian who had kept pace with h the forest He was not there; he walked withcreature in the diht and left, and saw only the tall, straight pines and the needle-strewn ground How long he had been gone I could not tell He ht have left me when first we came to the pines, for my dreams had held me, and I had not looked his way

There was that in the twilight place, or in the strangeness, the horror, and the yearning that had kept company with me that day, or in the dull weariness of a ht impossible I went on down the stream toward the river, because it chanced that my face was set in that direction

How dark was the shadow of the pines, how lifeless the earth beneath, how faint and far away the blue that showed here and there through rifts in the heavy roof of foliage! The strea to one side I turned with it, and there before me stood the minister!