DEB. SMITH TAKES A RESOLUTION.


It was a raw, overcast evening in the early part of January. Away to the
west there was a brownish glimmer in the dark-gray sky, denoting sunset,
and from that point there came barely sufficient light to disclose the
prominent features of a wild, dreary, uneven landscape.

The foreground was a rugged clearing in the forest, just where the crest
of a high hill began to slope rapidly down to the Brandywine. The dark
meadows, dotted with irregular lakes of ice, and long, dirty drifts of
unmelted snow, but not the stream itself, could be seen. Across the
narrow valley rose a cape, or foreland, of the hills beyond, timbered
nearly to the top, and falling, on either side, into deep lateral
glens,--those warm nooks which the first settlers loved to choose, both
from their snug aspect of shelter, and from the cold, sparkling springs
of water which every one of them held in its lap. Back of the summits of
all the hills stretched a rich, rolling upland, cleared and mapped into
spacious fields, but showing everywhere an edge of dark, wintry woods
against the darkening sky.

In the midst of this clearing stood a rough cabin, or rather half-cabin,
of logs; for the back of it was formed by a ledge of slaty rocks, some
ten or twelve feet in height, which here cropped out of the hill-side.
The raw clay with which the crevices between the logs had been stopped,
had fallen out in many places; the roof of long strips of peeled bark
was shrivelled by wind and sun, and held in its place by stones and
heavy branches of trees, and a square tower of plastered sticks in one
corner very imperfectly suggested a chimney. There was no inclosed patch