standing silently staring after him as he took his way through the woods in the dusky red shadows of the autumnal gloaming.

Aurelia's vaunted home was indeed a poor place,—not even the rude though substantial log-cabin common to the region. It was a flimsy shanty of boards, and except for its rickety porch was more like a box than a house. It had its perch on a jutting eminence, where it seemed the familiar of the skies, so did the clouds and winds circle about it. Through the great gateway of Sunrise Gap it commanded a landscape of a scope that might typify a world, in its multitude of mountain ranges, in the intricacies of its intervening valleys, in the glittering coils of its water-courses. Basil would sometimes sink into deep silences, overpowered by the majesty of nature in this place. After a long hiatus the bow would tremble and falter on the strings as if overawed for a time; presently the theme would strengthen, expand, resound with large meaning, and then he would send forth melodies that he had never before played or heard, his own dream, the reflection of that mighty mood of nature in the limpid pool of his receptive mind.

Around were rocks, crags, chasms,—the fields which nourished the family lay well from the verge, within the purlieus of the limited mountain plateau. He had sought to persuade himself that it was to save all the arable land for tillage that he had placed his house and door-yard here, but both he and Aurelia were secretly aware of the subterfuge; he would fain be always within the glamour of the prospect through Sunrise Gap!

Their interlocutor had truly deemed that the woman should have been earlier at home cooking the supper. Dusk had deepened to darkness long before the meal smoked upon the board. The spinning-wheel had begun to whir for her evening stint when other hill-folks had betaken themselves to bed. Basil puffed his pipe before the fire; the flicker and flare pervaded every nook of the bright little house. Strings of red-pepper-pods flaunted in festoons from the beams; the baby slumbered under a gay quilt in his rude cradle, never far from his mother's hand, but the bluff little boy was still up and about, although his aspect, round and burly, in a scanty nightgown, gave token of recognition of the fact that bed was his appropriate place. His shrill plaintive voice rose ever and anon wakefully.

"I wanter hear a bear tale,—I wanter hear a bear tale."

Thus Basil must needs knock the ashes from his pipe the better to devote himself to the narration,—a prince of raconteurs, to judge by the spell-bound interest of the youngster who stood at his knee and hung on his words. Even Aurelia checked the whir of her wheel to listen smilingly. She broke out laughing in appreciative pleasure when Basil took up the violin to show how a jovial old bear, who intruded into this very house one day when all the family were away at the church in the cove, and who mistook the instrument for a banjo, addressed himself to picking out this tune, singing the while a quaint and ursine lay. Basil embellished the imitation with a masterly effect of realistic growls.

"Ef ye keep goin' at that gait, Basil," Aurelia admonished him, "daylight will ketch us all wide awake around the fire,—no wonder the child won't go to bed." She seemed suddenly impressed with the pervasive cheer. "What a fool that man, Jube Kennedy, must be! How could ennybody hev a sweeter, darlinger home than we uns hev got hyar in Sunrise Gap!"

On the languorous autumn a fierce winter ensued. The cold came early. The deciduous growths of the forests were leafless ere November waned, rifled by the riotous marauding winds. December set in with the gusty snow flying fast. Drear were the gray skies; ghastly the sheeted ranges. Drifts piled high in bleak ravines, and the grim gneissoid crags were begirt with gigantic icicles. But about the little house in Sunrise Gap that kept so warm a heart, the holly trees showed their glad green leaves and the red berries glowed with a mystic