Rance Joyner, or rather, his spiritual substance, was seen by dusk and darkness on deserted roads, was observed crossing fields and coming out of woods, was seen to toil up a hill along a narrow path at evening--and then to vanish suddenly. Often, these apparitions had no discernible relation to any human happening; more often, they were precedent, coincident, or subsequent to some fatal circumstance. And this ghostly power was not limited to the period of his boyhood. It continued, with increasing force and frequency, into the years of his manhood and maturity.
 Thus, one evening early in the month of April, 1862, the wife of Lafayette Joyner, coming to the door of her house--which was built on the summit of a hill, or ledge, above a little river--suddenly espied Rance toiling up the steep path that led up to the house. In his soiled and ragged uniform, he looked footsore, unkempt, dusty, and unutterably weary--"as if," she said, "he had come a long, long ways"- as indeed, he must have done, since at that moment he was a private soldier in one of Jackson's regiments in Virginia.
 But Lafayette Joyner's wife could see him plainly as he paused for a moment to push open a long gate that gave upon the road below her, halfway down the hill. She turned, she said, in her excitement for a moment, to shout the news of his approach to others in the house, and in that instant he had vanished from her sight. When she looked again, no one was there; the scene was fading into night and stillness, and the woman wrung her hands in her despair, saying: "Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! What's to become of us? What's happened now?"
 Such was her story. And, as always, it confirmed a fatal event. On that day in April, more than two hundred miles to the westward, the bloody battle of Shiloh had been fought in Tennessee, and at that moment, although the news did not get back to them for several weeks, one of the brothers, John, was lying on the field, his shattered face turned upward, dead.
 Such, then, were some of the stories Aunt Maw told to George.
 And always, when she spoke so in the night, as the coal-fire flared and crumbled in the grate, and the huge demented winds of darkness howled around them and the terror of strong silence fed forever at his heart--he could hear the thousand death-devouring voices of the Joy ners speaking triumphantly from the darkness of a hundred years, the lost and lonely sorrow of the hills, and somehow smell incredibly- always and forever!--the soft, fragrant ash of the pine blaze, the pungent sharpness of the whittled wood, the winy warmth and fullness of mellow apples. And horribly, somehow, to these odors were always added the death-evoking smells of turpentine and camphor- which were a lost memory of infancy, when his mother had taken him, a child of two, to such a room--warmth, apples, Joyner room, and all- to see his grandfather the night before he died.
 Upon a thousand lost and lonely roads in the ever-lost and ever lonely hills he heard the unctuous, drawling voices of the Joyners. He saw them toiling up a wooded hill in sad, hushed, evening light to vanish like a wraith into thin air; and the terrible prophecies of old wars and battles, and of all the men who had that day been buried in the earth, were in that instant apparition and farewell! He saw them in a thousand little houses of the wilderness, in years more far and lonely than the years of Vercingetorix, coming in at darkness always to watch the night away beside the dead, to sit in semi-darkness in some neighbor's ill-starred house, to sit around the piny fire-flame's dance of death, and with triumphant lust to drawl and whittle night away while the pine logs flamed and crumbled to soft ash and their voices spoke forever their fated and invincible auguries of sorrow.
 What was it Aunt Maw thus evoked by the terrific weavings of her memory? In the boy's vision of that world, the Joyners were a race as lawless as the earth, as criminal as nature. They hurled their prodigal seed into the raw earth of a mountain woman's body, bringing to life a swarming progeny which lived or died, was extinguished in its in fancy or fought its way triumphantly to maturity against the savage enemies of poverty, ignorance, and squalor which menaced it at every step. They bloomed or perished as things live or die in nature--but the triumphant Joyners, superior to all loss or waste, lived forever as a river lives. Other tribes of men came up out of the earth, flourished for a space, and then, engulfed and falling, went back into the earth from which they came. Only the Joyners--these horror-hungry, time-devour ing Joyners--lived, and would not die.
 And he belonged to that fatal, mad, devouring world from whose prison there was no escape. He belonged to it, even as three hundred of his blood and bone had belonged to it, and must unweave it from his brain, distill it from his blood, unspin it from his entrails, and escape with demonic and exultant joy into his father's world, new lands and mornings and the shining city--or drown like a mad dog, die!
 From the first years of coherent memory, George had the sense of the overpowering immanence of the golden life. It seemed to him that he was always on the verge of finding it. In his childhood it was all around him, impending numbly, softly, filling him with an intolerable excultancy of wordless joy. It wrenched his heart with its wild pain of ecstasy and tore the sinews of his life asunder, but yet it filled his soul with the triumphant sense of instant release, impending discovery- as if a great wall in the air would suddenly be revealed and sundered, as if an enormous door would open slowly, awfully, with the tremendous majesty of an utter and invisible silence. He never found a word for it, but he had a thousand spells and prayers and images that would give it coherence, shape, and meanings that no words could do.
 He thought that he could twist his hand a certain way, or turn his wrist, or make a certain simple movement of rotation into space (as boys will learn the movement to unsolve a puzzle of linked chains, or as an expert in the mysteries of locks can feel the bearings faintly, softly, rolling through his finger tips, and know the instant that he finds the combination to unlock the safe)--and that by making this rotation with his hand, he would find the lost dimension of that secret world, and instantly step through the door that he had opened.
 And he had other chants and incantations that would make that world reveal itself to him. Thus, for a period of ten years or more, he had a spell for almost everything he did.