endors had once been here vouchsafed to the faltering
eye of man. The illusion had come to be very dear to him; in this
insistent localization of his faith it was all very near. And so he
would go down to the slope below, among the weird, stunted trees, and
look once more upon the broken tables, and ponder upon the strange signs
written by time thereon. The insistent fall of the rain, the incisive
blasts of the wind, coming again and again, though the centuries went,
were registered here in mystic runes. The surface had weathered to a
whitish-gray, but still in tiny depressions its pristine dark color
showed in rugose characters. A splintered fissure held delicate fucoid
impressions in fine script full of meaning. A series of worm-holes
traced erratic hieroglyphics across a scaling corner; all the varied
texts were illuminated by quartzose particles glittering in the sun, and
here and there fine green grains of glauconite. He knew no names like
these, and naught of meteorological potency. He had studied no other
rock. His casual notice had been arrested nowhere by similar signs.
Under the influence of his ignorant superstition, his cherished
illusion, the lonely wilderness, what wonder that, as he pondered
upon the rocks, strange mysteries seemed revealed to him? He found
significance in these cabalistic scriptures--nay, he read inspired
words! With the ramrod of his gun he sought to follow the fine tracings
of the letters writ by the finger of the Lord on the stone tables that
Moses flung down from the mountain-top in his wrath.

With a devout thankfulness Purdee realized that he owned the land where
they lay. It was worth, perhaps, a few cents an acre; it was utterly
untillable, almost inaccessible, and his gratulation owed its fervor
only to its spiritual values. He was an idle and shiftless fellow,
and had known no glow of acquisition, no other pride of possession.
He herded cattle much of the time in the summer, and he hunted in the
winter--wolves chiefly, their hair being long and finer at this season,
and the smaller furry gentry; for he dealt in peltry. And so, despite
the vastness of the mountain wilds, he often came and knelt beside the
rocks with his rifle in his hand, and sought anew to decipher the mystic
legends. His face, bending over the tables of the Law with the earnest
research of a student, with the chastened subduement of devotion, with
all the calm sentiments of reverie, Jacked something of its norm