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The other was serious enough; my letters from home gave intimation that my father's health was worse. No boding fears were expressed, but I was grown timid and despondent, and could not help fearing that some dreadful calamity awaited us there.

I thought I had never heard so boding a sound; a sound that seemed to speak of judgment and the resurrection, like belfry-mouthed Paul of Tarsus. It was not in the direction of the shore; but seemed to come out of the vaults of the sea, and out of the mist and fog. Who was dead, and what could it be?

The "run" made it necessary to boil all night; and filling the kettles and adjusting the fires, Bart and the boys, hungry and tired, went up to supper and the chores; after which Bart and Edward, taking the former's rifle, and lighted by a hickory torch, returned to the camp for the night Edward really to sleep, sweet and unbroken, in the cabin, and Bart to take care of the kettles and fires, to muse and dream, and think bright, strange thoughts, and watch the effects of the lights and shadows, listen to the dropping of the sap into the buckets, and the boding owls, whose melancholy notes harmonized with, rather than interrupted, the solemn effect of deepest night.

"And this world of incomparable unshadowed loveliness awaits me," he said, the superstition of the age mingling for the moment with thoughts which seemed to mark him a century beyond his compeers; "purchased by that single moment of suffering called death. It is mine, my beloved, and shall be thine; and oh, when we meet there, how trivial will seem the dark woes and boding cares of earth!

His right hand rested on his unsheathed sword, and his attitude was that of careless and assured composure; but in his gathered brow, and in the boding glitter of his eye, I could discern the deadly purpose of the forest lion, about to spring upon his prey, and fully confident in his own powers and resources.

As I paced up the old avenue, on which the waning moon threw its light with a pale and whitish tinge, I looked back with a deep and boding sigh towards the walls which contained Diana Vernon, under the despondent impression that we had probably parted to meet no more.

Then spake Yamen, prophet of the Temple of Obin that stands on the shores of a great lake, facing east. Yamen said: "I pray oft to the gods who sit above the twilight behind the east. When the clouds are heavy and red at sunset, or when there is boding of thunder or eclipse, then I pray not, lest my prayers be scattered and beaten earthward.

Thus fought the rest in the likeness of blazing fire, while to Achilles came Antilochos, a messenger fleet of foot. Him found he in front of his ships of upright horns, boding in his soul the things which even now were accomplished. And sore troubled he spake to his great heart: "Ay me, wherefore again are the flowing-haired Achaians flocking to the ships and flying in rout over the plain?

What the ravens really sought for he knew all too well, for he had seen their knotted tracks by dead forms; yet somehow their passage conjured up thoughts in his brain which had never disturbed him before. They were birds of death, rapacious and evil-bringing, and they had cast their boding shadows upon him.

He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock, listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving with his walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He raked it out of the vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull, with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him.