Hamlin's charming insolence or the editor's cultivated manner. 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.
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