But he glanced over a township map on the walls of the reading-room, and took note of the names of the owners of different lots, farms, and ranches, passing that of Delatour with the others.

Then he drove leisurely in the direction of the woods, and, reaching them, tied his horse to a young sapling in the shade, and entered their domain with a shambling but familiar woodman's step.
It is not the purpose of this brief chronicle to follow Mr.Bowers in his professional diagnosis of the locality.

He recognized Nature in one of her moods of wasteful extravagance,--a waste that his experienced eye could tell was also sapping the vitality of those outwardly robust shafts that rose around him.

He knew, without testing them, that half of these fair-seeming columns were hollow and rotten at the core; he could detect the chill odor of decay through the hot balsamic spices stirred by the wind that streamed through their long aisles,--like incense mingling with the exhalations of a crypt.

He stopped now and then to part the heavy fronds down to their roots in the dank moss, seeing again, as he had told the editor, the weird SECOND twilight through their miniature stems, and the microcosm of life that filled it.