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The youth was glad enough to go. He took the candle the old woman provided and was directed out of the door across a dark hall into the guest room on the other side.

The candle showed dimly the walls of the guest chamber which were plastered and whitewashed. The windows were small and high, which gave the room a certain vague resemblance to a prison. A rude crayon portrait of one of the Meredith ancestors hung on the wall. It was the work of an enlarging house in Chicago and had been sold to Mrs. Meredith by a travelling salesman. Abner’s sleeping place was a mighty four-poster in the corner which was surmounted by a feather bed of enormous depth.

Abner took off his shoes and trousers in the utmost depression; he blew out his breath and looked around the melancholy room without finding a point where his eyes could rest. He thrust his toe under the overhang of the feather bed and on top of the rail, leaned down and blew out his candle, and then made a rather desperate lunge upward and over in the darkness and fell into a mass of feathers. The smell of feathers and the mustiness of long-unused sheets filled the air. The youth straightened out and lay staring up into the blackness. The feathers cupped around his body and between his outspread legs and grew warmer and warmer in the warm night. Presently perspiration dampened his shirt and drawers, and he flung about shifting to places which were temporarily cool. He sickened with longing for the poorhouse, for Mrs. Sandage and Colonel Wybe and Beatrice Belle. He remembered the county court had made him a free man, that he was alone in the world, a being without any family connection whatever; no one would ever pay him two thoughts again; desolation seized him. He gave up trying to find a cool place in the bed and so went to sleep.

The worst of nights finally pass and are no more. At length morning came with its coolness and dew and its salvo of light saluting the day. The celebration of chanticleers far and near aroused Abner, who turned out of bed, replaced his trousers and shoes and thereby was "dressed." When