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THE ENCHANTMENT OF OLD DANIEL.

IN the White Mountain district of New England, high up among the hills, is a little valley, so retired that scarce any but enthusiastic trout-hunters have found it out, and so lonely that one sees here and there deserted farms, whose occupants had not courage to stay in the solitude, but have fled to busier haunts. Mount Osceola looks down upon it, overtopping a company of hills that shoulder each other, and Mad River tumbles headlong out of the valley, rushing into the dark pine woods. Thick forests are all about, and it would seem a gloomy place to enter at nightfall, with only one or two twinkling lights in the one or two houses, and the white road making its way to the little saw-mill, which stands in a niche, carved out of the black woods, at the further end of the valley. Gloomier still would it seem to push by the mill into the silent woods, following a foot-path little used, and feeling the forest close behind one, as if

shutting out forever the light of day and the voices of men.

Yet, along this lonely path, leaving the mill behind and going deeper into the forest, walked an old man, with a bag on his back, upon the night of the last day of the year. It was Daniel Desmond, a hoary-headed mariner, who for fifty years had followed the sea, being shifted with his battered chest from one vessel to another, sailing north, south, east, and west, and had at last given up the pursuit, mooring his old hulk at the foot of Mount Osceola, in the loneliest spot of the lonely valley of the Mad. For, back from the valley, was a clearing in the forest which had been made long years before by a man who thought it as good and cheap a place as any in which to work and live. He had built a small house there, had planted a field, and put up a fence to keep out the world and the world's stray cattle; but the place grew to be so utterly desolate that at length he fled from it, leaving the house and ploughed field and fences to be inhabited by the squirrels, or perchance by bears and bob-cats. So it had remained for several years. The forest, seeing no one about, began by degrees to resume its claim to the land which had been forcibly taken from it. First the little trees

came timidly across the edge of the clearing, and, finding no one, not even a scarecrow in the corn-field, they made up their minds to stay; then the trees behind pushed them forward, and so the forest again began to take possession of the clearing, while the rain and wind and the hot sun all attacked the helpless house, till it began to crumble.

It was to this forlorn spot that old Daniel was slowly making his way along the woodpath. It was dark above, for heavy clouds were in the sky; it was dark all about, so that he could scarcely make out the path with his eyes; and it was darker than all in poor old Daniel's heart. For that afternoon his shaggy dog, Lion, sole house-companion, had strayed away, whither he knew not. He stopped now and then to whistle for his dog, but whistled and waited in vain. He did not find him at home either when he reached the crumbling house, which he was making shift to live in; and Daniel shook his head miserably all the evening as he crouched over his fire, which warmed his old bones, to be sure, but seemed unable to send a particle of warmth into his shivering soul.

But why was this battered mariner ending his days in such forlorn fashion, and what mis

erable fortune drove him to this lonely spot? An idle reason indeed: but nothing better could old Daniel answer, than that in this valley he was born and here he spent his childhood; that, when he went away to be beaten about on seas, he carried with him a blessed memory of the spot, and ever his one dream had been whether frozen in the northern ice, or tossed in torrid zone to come back to his New England home and end his days in the valley of the Mad. So he had come, and here he was living in the old house which his father had built and fled from, and where his childish memories clustered. It was not so beautiful as he remembered it; but he clung to it like the shipwrecked mariner he was, flung up into these hills from the tossing sea.

As old Daniel sat by the fire, rubbing his hands slowly over his head, he began to think of his voyages, of the strange lands he had seen. Everywhere that he had been, to be sure, he had thought it not half so beautiful as the little home on the mountains; but somehow, now that he was here, the old man was restless to be elsewhere. He went to the window and looked out, shading his face with his hands. Nothing to be seen; it was all black, and there was no sign of faithful Lion.

"Dear, dear," he sighed to himself, "if only I could take one voyage more and sail to some new land, where all this trouble should be gone, and things wouldn't be quite so black and dismal. O, this is a doleful New Year's Eve. It don't look as if the new year were going to be much better than the old ones," and Daniel fumbled about the room with his tallow candle, putting things to rights before he should go to bed. Even when he had gathered himself up for a night's sleep, he continued to shake his head, and mumble over the forlorn world which he had to live in, when he was sure there was one somewhere which was bright and pure.

But where was the bark that would sail to such a world, and take in such a weatherbeaten, dreary fellow ? If Daniel had been asked, he would have shaken his head more dolefully than before, and yet near it was; and now indeed began a wonder. The mariner had shut his eyes upon the old earth with its leafless trees and dingy ground, its gloomy forests hemming in the open clearing, and the open clearing itself, with its stubble and decayed stumps and rotten fences. All that was out of sight, not to be wished back; something better was to come, and that right soon. For now there came, without sound, but filling the

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