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“This house? The sun is a good sun, but it never gilds this house. Why should it? This old house is rotting. That makes it so mossy. In the morning, the sun comes in at this old window, to be sure boarded up, when first we came; a window I can’t keep clean, do what I may and half burns, and nearly blinds me at my sewing, besides setting the flies and wasps astir such flies and wasps as only lone mountain houses know. See, here is the curtain this apron I try to shut it out with then. It fades it, you see. Sun gild this house? not that ever Marianna saw.”

“Because when this roof is gilded most, then you stay here within.”

“The hottest, weariest hour of day, you mean? Sir, the sun gilds not this roof. It leaked so, brother newly shingled all one side. Did you not see it? The north side, where the sun strikes most on what the rain has wetted. The sun is a good sun; but this roof, it first scorches, and then rots. An old house. They went West, and are long dead, they say, who built it. A mountain house. In winter no fox could den in it. That chimney-place has been blocked up with snow, just like a hollow stump.”

“Yours are strange fancies, Marianna.”

“They but reflect the things.”

“Then I should have said, ‘These are strange things,’ rather than, ‘Yours are strange fancies.'”

“As you will;” and took up her sewing.

Something in those quiet words, or in that quiet act, it made me mute again; while, noting, through the fairy window, a broad shadow stealing on, as cast by some gigantic condor, floating at brooding poise on outstretched wings, I marked how, by its deeper and inclusive dusk, it wiped away into itself all lesser shades of rock or fern.

“You watch the cloud,” said Marianna.

“No, a shadow; a cloud’s, no doubt though that I cannot see. How did you know it? Your eyes are on your work.”

“It dusked my work. There, now the cloud is gone, Tray comes back.”

“How?”

“The dog, the shaggy dog. At noon, he steals off, of himself, to change his shape returns, and lies down awhile, nigh the door. Don’t you see him? His head is turned round at you; though, when you came, he looked before him.”

“Your eyes rest but on your work; what do you speak of?”

“By the window, crossing.”

“You mean this shaggy shadow the nigh one? And, yes, now that I mark it, it is not unlike a large, black Newfoundland dog. The invading shadow gone, the invaded one returns. But I do not see what casts it.”

“For that, you must go without.”

“One of those grassy rocks, no doubt.”

“You see his head, his face?”

“The shadow’s? You speak as if you saw it, and all the time your eyes are on your work.”

“Tray looks at you,” still without glancing up; “this is his hour; I see him.”

“Have you, then, so long sat at this mountain-window, where but clouds and vapors pass, that, to you, shadows are as things, though you speak of them as of phantoms; that, by familiar knowledge, working like a second sight, you can, without looking for them, tell just where they are, though, as having mice-like feet, they creep about, and come and go; that, to you, these lifeless shadows are as living friends, who, though out of sight, are not out of mind, even in their faces is it so?”

“That way I never thought of it. But the friendliest one, that used to soothe my weariness so much, coolly quivering on the ferns, it was taken from me, never to return, as Tray did just now. The shadow of a birch. The tree was struck by lightning, and brother cut it up. You saw the cross-pile out-doors the buried root lies under it; but not the shadow. That is flown, and never will come back, nor ever anywhere stir again.”

Another cloud here stole along, once more blotting out the dog, and blackening all the mountain; while the stillness was so still, deafness might have forgot itself, or else believed that noiseless shadow spoke.

“Birds, Marianna, singing-birds, I hear none; I hear nothing. Boys and bob-o-links, do they never come a-berrying up here?”