AFTER THE FIRE.
III.
She did not seem to remember it, however. The next Saturday, though he did not bring the Indian boys' ears, as she half hoped, and wholly feared, he would, he did bring a large cage, in which was an aggressive green parrot in a furious temper over its long horseback ride from Crescent City, where he had purchased it from a sailor.
Peter, for such was his name, soon found a warm place in Bessie's affections, but she could never induce him to leave off a bad habit of swearing. He connected that manner of expression with Mason's presence alone, and evidently had an unforgiving heart under his brilliant feathers.
Life and time slipped quickly by in the uneventful monotony of the little village, interested only in its own small affairs, and cut off from the whirl of the outside world. The next two years came and went by Humphrey Mason, with nothing consciously to mark them in his memory except the changes in the weather. These materially affected his comfort and safety during the long rides through beating winter rain and wind, which at times forced him to pause until their fury was spent.
Several times during the second winter the southwest wind grew to a hurricane, against which no man could stand upright, but must crawl on hands and knees to shelter. It snatched the combing tops of great breakers, and dashed them over the town until the cisterns were filled with salty water unfit for use. The whole harbor was one roaring mass of surge, that broke against the cliffs until they trembled, and slid into the devouring element with a noise like the clashing together of runaway worlds. The sea birds were driven ashore in multitudes, exhausted and bruised, their terrified cries adding much to the horror of the war of sound. The timber and roofs of the vacant buildings were tossed about like toothpicks, to the terror and danger of the dwellers in the others, who barricaded their doors and put out their fires, expecting with every fresh blast to hear their own roofs part and leave them shelterless.
The beautiful forest back of the town was almost destroyed, the centuries-old trees being torn down as a scythe cut off the weeds by the roadside. One standing a little exposed would first yield to the mighty force, and lose its foothold in the rain-soaked earth, striking as it fell another,—that one another and so on, until several could be seen going down at once. The appearance of their tattered and broken ranks standing amid the ruin of their fallen comrades was a desolate thing to see; and a terrible labor it was for a horse and rider to fight a way through that tangled mass of fallen trunks.
It was late in the second winter, just after the last and worst wind-storms that our hero was obliged to leave his horse some miles distant in the timber and carry saddle and mailbag on his shoulders through the tempest, which was spending its forces in occasional fierce blasts, that obliged him to lie flat and hold to the bushes or dodge flying fragments from the writhing branches overhead. It was late at night when at last, tired and muddy, indeed, he reached the fort-house, after delivering the scanty mail to Uncle Sam's sleep! agent.
He opened the door of a long, low room at the end of the house, where he entered boldly to remove his heavy
