ere the details of the landscape. The
enthusiasm of the amateur is always a more urgent motive power than
the restrained and utilitarian industry of the professional.

Few sworn knights of the crayon would have sat sketching so long in
that temperature as he did, with the sun blazing through his straw hat
and his blood mustering under his thin skin; but he stopped at a point
short of sunstroke, and it was with a tumultuous sense of success that
he at last arose, and, with the sketch-book still open, walked across
the road and laid it on the pommel of the mountaineer's saddle.

Constant Hite took it up suspiciously and looked at it askance. It is
to be doubted if ever before he had seen a picture, unless perchance
in the primary reading-book of his callow days at the public school,
spasmodically opened at intervals at the "church house" in the Cove.
He continued to gravely gaze at the sketch, held sideways and almost
reversed, for some moments.

"Bless Gawd! hyar's Whitefoot's muzzle jes' ez nat'ral--an'
_Me_--waal, sir! don't _I_ look proud!" he cried suddenly, with a note
of such succulent vanity, so finely flavored a pride, that the
stranger could but laugh at the zest of his triumph.

"Do you see the witch-face?" he demanded.

"Hesh! hesh!" cried the mountaineer hilariously. "Don't 'sturb me
'bout yer witch-face. Ef thar ain't the buck,--yes, toler'ble
fat,--an' with all his horns! An' look at my boot,--actially the spur
on it! An' my hat turned up;" he raised his flattered hand to the brim
as if to verify its position.

"You didn't know you were so good looking, hey?" suggested the amused
town man.

"My Lord, naw!" declared Hite, laughing at himself, yet laughing
delightedly. "I dunno _how_ the gals make out to do without me at
all!"

The pleased artist laughed, too. "Well, hand it over," he said, as he
reached out for the book. "We must be getting out of this sun. I'm not
used to it, you see."

He put his foot in the stirrup as he spoke, and as he swung himself
into the saddle the mountaineer reluctantly closed and relinquished
the book. "I'd like ter see it agin, some time or other," he observed.

He remembered this wish afterward, and how little he then imagined
where and in what manner he was destined to see it again.

They rode on together into the dense woods, leaving the wind and the
sunshine and the flying clouds fluctuating over the broad expanse of
the mountains, and the witch-face silently m